"The Snakes is many things - a parable and an ancient drama where a father’s greed devours his children, a police procedural, an avid take on tabloid venality, and a bitter comedy, superbly observed, where behind a woman’s eyes she is ‘all movement inside herself, like a wasp in a glass.’ I admit that I’m still shaken by parts of this novel. Sadie Jones writes with pitiless aplomb and corrosive intelligence." (Louise Erdrich)

A chilling story and impossible to pause, The Snakes is Sadie Jones at her best: breathtakingly powerful, brilliantly incisive, and utterly devastating.

The new novel by Sadie Jones tells the tense and violent story of the Adamsons, a dysfunctional English family, with exceptional wealth, whose darkest secrets come back to bite them. Set mostly in rural France during contemporary times, The Snakes is an all-consuming listen and a devastating portrait of how money corrupts, and how chance can deal a deadly hand.

The Snakes exposes the damage wreaked by parents on children as observed by a new member of the family, Dan, a mixed-race man from Peckham who marries Bea, the daughter who refuses to take any of her father’s filthy money. But when Bea’s brother, Alex (who runs a shabby hotel in Paligny, France), dies suddenly in unexplained circumstances, the confusion and suspicion which arise bring other dark family secrets - and violence - to the surface. And none of the family, even the good members, go untouched.