The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

 

It is 1912 and Emerald Torrington is turning twenty.  For her party, she has invited as house guests an old friend Patience and her mother.  Emerald lives in Sterne, a large country house her father had bought when he was flush.  But his finances changed and he got ill and passed away.  Now Emerald lives there with her mother and stepfather, her brother Clovis and her little sister who everyone calls Smudge.  Her stepfather won't be there as he has gone to London to try to borrow enough money that the family can keep the house as Emerald's father had gone deeply into debt before his death.

But things don't turn out as planned.  First, Patience's mother becomes ill and can't come so Patience's brother Ernest comes instead.  All the Torringtons remember him as a strange boy who poked around looking for bugs and who was a pest.  Then the neighbor John comes by and has to be invited to the party.  John has his eye on the house having already bought some of the land and he also has his eye on Emerald, thinking she might be the wife he has been looking for.

Then a disaster happens.  A train wrecks nearby and the survivors are sent to Sterne until they can be retrieved and sent on their way.  There is no room for them, no plans to feed twenty-five people.  How can they be accommodated?  Along with them comes one man who seems to be in the upper part of society and it turns out he knows Emerald's mother.  Clovis is entranced by him but neither Emerald nor Patience care for him at all.  How will this unintended house party end?

Sadie Jones is a novelist who lives in London where she was raised.  Her work has been listed for the Orange Prize (now the Woman's Prize for Fiction) several times and she won the Costa First Novel award.  She has the prized ability to have each of her novels seem quite different from the others unlike other authors whose work seems to follow a set routine.  Her characters are finely drawn and the surprises that underpin the novel are unanticipated.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.