Fallout

February 3, 2014
Jones’s latest (after The Uninvited Guests) follows the career of Luke Kanowski, who leaves behind his dysfunctional family in Northern England and moves to London in the late 1960s to pursue a career as a playwright. He is soon befriended by aspiring producer Paul Driscoll and Paul’s girlfriend, Leigh Radley; together, the three start a small theater company called Graft. The trio’s fulfilling artistic life together gradually comes under the strain of Luke’s compulsive womanizing and Leigh’s unrequited attraction to him. Their rocky triangle is further threatened by Nina Jacobs, who has been groomed by her mother, a failed actress, for a life on the stage; Luke becomes obsessed with Nina’s melancholy beauty, but her marriage to an abusive theater producer, Tony, complicates their romance. As Luke and Nina embark on a torrid love affair, Luke finds success on his own as a playwright and is forced to choose between his hard-to-please beloved and the friends who have nursed his ambitions. An engrossing melodrama of theater life, the novel’s only drawback is Jones’s tendency toward precious turns of phrase. Her talent emerges most in the absorbing plot, which convincingly shows how friends can be torn apart by lust and ambition. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company.

February 1, 2014

Hats off to Jones (The Uninvited Guests; The Outcast) for starting a novel with a 13-year-old boy picking the lock at the psychiatric hospital to spring his mother. That startling opening draws readers into the romantic story of a young writer in 1970s London. Luke breaks away from his small town in northern England and embarks on a journey to becoming a playwright. His story twists and turns through the London theater scene and drug culture as Luke struggles with literary ambition, success, and the throes of falling in and out of love. In his naivete, the quirky playwright uses women like tissues and goes home to write plays until the wee hours. With a producer and a woman stage manager, Luke forms a theater company and the first of several triangles in his quest for love, art, and friendship. When Luke becomes enmeshed with a married actress, he comes of age by facing the consequences. VERDICT Jones's intricate, complex plot, sympathetically drawn characters, and authentic depictions of damaged genius make an unassailable claim for the power of a writer's detailed observation in the face of formula fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/3/13.]--J.L. Morin, Boston Univ.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2014
Charismatic young playwright Luke Kanowski, escaping a dark family history to forge his own destiny in London's Theatreland, heads the cast in a welcome if less sure-footed return to period heartache by talented British writer Jones (The Uninvited Guests, 2012, etc.). Notably deft in her reconstructions of not-so-distant eras, Jones here tags Biba fashion, the Osmonds, T. Rex and a myriad other evocative details of the late 1960s and early '70s as background to the four stage-struck hopefuls at the center of her fourth novel, each of them significantly molded by their parents' influences. Luke has broken away from a grim home life--his father's a boozy immigrant, his mother's a long-term patient in the local mental asylum--after a chance meeting with two strangers, aspiring stage producer Paul Driscoll and student Leigh Radley. Paul and Luke are destined to become firm friends, while Leigh, caught between them, will become Paul's girlfriend after a humiliatingly hurtful early encounter with Luke. Actress Nina Jacobs has survived the lifelong pressure of a competitive mother by walling herself in passivity. While Luke begins to find success as a writer, Nina is pushed by her mother into a relationship with Tony Moore, a manipulative stage producer of ambiguous sexual orientation. Tony not only marries Nina, but casts her in a play about a torture victim, which makes her a star--and bewitches Luke into wanting to save her. Jones' gift for emotional intensity has not deserted her, but her material here is less beguiling than in her two first (and strongest) novels, The Outcast (2008) and Small Wars (2010). Nina is an unsympathetic character, and the psychology underpinning events develops in increasingly schematic fashion. Crises, broken promises and bruised hearts ensue, and although the story comes to rest in the right place, it never quite escapes its sense of staginess. Skillful, intelligent, always readable but this time less-persuasive work from an appealing author.

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Starred review from February 1, 2014
This intoxicating, deeply romantic novel of theater, love, and friendship is set in London during the 1970s. Luke Kanowski is desperate to escape his provincial hometown and the specter of his mentally ill mother, locked away in an asylum, and his depressed father, who numbs himself with drink. When Luke moves to London and falls in with aspiring producer Paul Driscoll and Paul's girlfriend, Leigh Radley, he finally feels that he has found a home for himself, both personally and artistically. The three form a repertory company, madly building sets, holding casting calls, and searching for the best scripts. And although Luke is loath to show anyone his work, he spends hours locked in his room, pouring his experiences onto paper. When he finally emerges with a script that becomes a hugely successful play, he finds that artistic triumph is more complicated than he could ever have imagined, especially when his married lover, fragile actress Nina Jacobs, becomes obsessed with landing a part in the play, despite the fact that she is wrong for the part. With both microscopic precision and operatic emotions, Jones, in her fourth novel (after The Uninvited Guests, 2012), perfectly captures the exhilaration of the young and the talented as they find their footing in both art and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)