I have read all of Sadie Jones’ novels and was thrilled to have the opportunity to read her new book. Bea and Dan, a young married couple, arrange a grown up ‘gap year’, aiming to travel through France. They take the opportunity to visit her troubled brother Alex who is starting up a hotel with the investment of their wealthy parents. Whilst they are staying at the hotel, a terrible event occurs which brings all the old issues and bitterness back to the fore. A highly literary thriller, The Snakes is beautifully written and really grips as it hurtles towards its conclusion.

Bea wants to help everyone, even a troubled young woman with a knife who she sees when she pops into a charity shop to buy her handsome husband, Dan a leather bag as a gift. She gives tirelessly of herself as an NHS psychologist and lives a frugal, eco life relsihing coming home to their tiny one bed flat. Her husband Dan isn't so happy, an aspiring artist he has given up his dreams to contribute towards the mortgage by working as a letting agent, a job he hates. He persuades Bea that they should use their "cushion" (savings) to go on a road trip around Europe. Bea suggests that they call in to see her brother, Alex, a recovering addict who is renovating and running a hotel. Dan agrees as Bea is estranged from her parents, who he hasn''t met them.

The hotel is decrepit and has the titular snakes residing in the attic and grounds. Dan dislikes Alex and swhen Bea's parents show up he starts to question just how wealthy Bea's parents are and why she won't make their life easier by accepting money from them. On an errand for their bully of a father, Alex is shockingy killed and the narrative follows the family and their shifting dynamics as the police investigate. adn we discover the shocking family secret that has haunted Bea.

I enjoyed this novel, it really surprises. I thought we were going to have some sort of powerplay between Alex and Dan in the stifling hot FRench countryside, but then Bea's dreadful but immensely wealthy parents are brought into the mix and we discover why Alex and Bea are so damaged. Blindsided, Alex's death becomes a murder investifgation and then the narrative becomes a thriller. It ends a bit suddenly, which disappointed me a bit, but that was because it was so good, I wnated to learn more.

The setting of a run-down hotel in Burgundy was appealing and add in to the equation, a murder and a mystery to be solved, then this promised to constitute a good read. Jones portrays the main characters quite well. For example you are made to swing from feeling annoyed and frustrated with the brother one moment, to feeling pity and great sorrow for him, especially as his relationship with his mother is revealed. This is perhaps why, although you know he must be involved in something undesirable, you are still somewhat surprised at his demise. The relationship between the two main characters was sometimes strong and believable but at other times it didn't ring true for me and they became quite annoying..
Whilst the introduction was exciting and does re-enter the book later, I didn't really understand the full relevance of the drama in it.
The plot dragged a little for me at times but, I have to say, that Jones did not flinch from providing what would probably be a more realistic and likely, although more unexpected ending.

Thank you to NetGalley and Chatto and Windus (Random House UK, Vintage Publishing) for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

It's a shame because 80% of "The Snakes" was an easy 5* for me and I fully expected that to be my rating and that I would write a wholly positive review.

Sadly it's not to be but we'll start with the really good stuff. The Snakes is for the most part a beautifully complex and beautifully written family drama - following one family through a tragedy that rips the band aid off the many hidden truths in their past. It is thought provoking, melancholy, emotionally resonant and vaguely disconcerting throughout.

Money is the root of all evil is definitely a theme here as are familial relationships and the darkness they can hide. Sadie Jones builds her characters pitch perfectly, absorbing you into their lives and bringing you a gradual understanding of all their experience and motivations. The setting is wonderfully described, especially the dilapidated hotel with it's snakes in the attic and it's enveloped horrors.

But then something changed. The last few chapters are just bizarre. The ending is a throwaway, an abrupt and terribly unsatisfactory (subjectively speaking) mish mash. 

Whilst I think I can see what the author intends I'm not actually sure - and I like to think of myself as at least vaguely intelligent. But it felt silly and pretentious if I'm honest and I do try to be - the reader is just left there to decide whether fate is appropriate. Or something. 

I didn't get it. Sadly it spoilt the whole thing for me - although I would point out that it is genuinely subjective and I feel sure that when more people read it there will be many that disagree with me.

Anyway the upshot is I'm irrationally irritated that I invested myself heavily into this one only to have a metaphorical bucket of freezing water thrown over me at the finish line. 

Still, I guess this review serves as a recommendation anyway. That's the way it goes sometimes.

A strange read. We firstly meet Bea and Dan, a young married couple, who decide to put their London life on hold and head off to Europe for a few months. With the help of "the cushion", their saving of less than £5000. we learn that Bea's family is rich but she wants nothing to do with them. When they stop off in France to visit her mixed up child-adult brother Alex, at his deserted and odd hotel, we wonder what has made the family so dysfunctional. When their parents arrive to visit we gradually learn the extent of her father's wealth and the reason for Bea's estrangement. She hasn't been honest with Dan though and the wealth is a surprise to him, and one he'd like to take advantage of. Is his love for Bea strong enough. Tragedy strikes and most of the book is around Alex's death and the aftermath. We see police discrimination, but also honour. The ending was very strange and while gasping, I felt it was incomplete, I wanted more, I didn't see the ending as a real conclusion or a satsifactory resolution. I did struggle to get through this at times, but then I raced to the end and was left frustrated. .

Bea and Dan are frustrated with their London life and jobs and therefore decide to take a couple of months off. They start their tour across Europe in France where Bea’s brother Alex runs a hotel. Yet, when they arrive in the Burgundy village, it seems completely deserted. The hotel has never seen any guests and the house is completely run down. However, Alex is happy with the way things are. Bea is all but close to her family and when her parents announce to visit their children, she is all but amused. Dan cannot understand his wife’s hostility towards her parents, but there is a lot more that he doesn’t know and when they are hit by a major incident, he finally gets to know his real in-laws.

It’s the third novel by Sadie Jones that I have read and just like the other two before, again I really enjoyed her style of writing. The full extent of the story only slowly reveals and even though it is not a classic suspense novel, you know that there is a lot buried that will be uncovered sooner or later and you eagerly wait for it to show.

The strongest aspect were the complicated family ties. It is not clear at the beginning why Bea resents her parents so much, only when these two characters show up you start to understand her hatred and why she tried to cut all bonds. It is clearly a dysfunctional family in all respects: a strong and stubborn father who, self-centred as he is, just ignores the needs of the other family members and egoistically subordinates all to his wishes. The mother, however, is rather weak and clearly has a very unhealthy relationship with her children, even though they vary a lot. Alex and Bea seem to get along quite well even though there is a big gap in their age, yet, their different attitude towards the parents makes it impossible for them to really unite.

And the novel is about money. It is difficult to talk about it without revealing too much of the plot, thus, quite obviously, it doesn’t really help to make you happy. Even if you got masses of it. All in all, a very compelling read that I enjoyed a lot.

I really did like the sound of this book from the blurb and it started off ok. But as I got into it more my interest faded.

For me the characters were horrible and self centred. The writing waa confusing and there was too much implied in the writing that it just wasnt for me. I see lots of great reviews for this but we cant love them all can we

The Snakes is a departure from Sadie Jones's usual excellent period novels, being set in the present day. It is a brilliant study of how power and money corrupt, and this is taken to tragic but inevitable extremes in this story.
When Dan and Bea need to get away from London they plan a trip to Europe. They have a cushion of money to rely on for a few months' travelling. On the way to Rome, the couple drop in on Bea's prodigal brother Alex. Alex is meant to be restoring and running a hotel, but when they arrive the place us a mess with no customers. Alex is in as much of a state as the hotel, and has been irretrievably broken by his upbringing.
To complicate matters, Alex and Bea's parents pay a visit. Bea is estranged from her parents, and has not told Dan that they are very rich. Despite the estrangement, Bea and Dan stay at the hotel to meet the parents, who are monstrous. It is as Bea cannot entirely break free from their malign influence. They cannot behave as a well-adjusted family would, and you understand why Bea has kept them at arm's length.
The story takes a number of shocking turns, which, after the fact seem inevitable. Thus is an angry, must-read, book. Five stars.

I thought The Snakes was excellent.

Bea and her husband Dan, who are scraping by financially as she works as a psychotherapist and he as a not-very-successful estate agent, decide to take a break and drive their old car to the continent, stopping briefly to see Bea’s brother Alex at the hotel which he runs. It turns out that Bea has refused to accept money from her father, who is rich enough to own a private jet, and that her brother’s hotel is a gift from the father but not really operating, as Alex isn’t wholly mentally stable. There is a death and there are significant developments in all the relationships, plus a deepening and increasingly sinister mystery.

This is really a book about money and its effect. It sounds a little dry and worthy but Sadie Jones writes unflashily but brilliantly and I was very caught up in it. She captures the power and expectations of the very rich, Bea’s rebellion and social conscience and the money’s seductive power over Dan, who was the son of a struggling single mother. There are other layers here too, not least about class and race, all subtly but forensically analysed.

The characters and relationships are very well done and the dialogue is excellent. Jones understands how to show character through speech and action without belabouring us with the points she is making, which makes them all the more powerful. Just as a small example, I thought this was a brilliant description of how it is after a stunning tragedy:
'They had seen chaos but there was no matching response, only the ordinary, and the flimsy boundaries of time. At eight o’clock, eat. At ten o’clock, go to bed. In the landscape of catastrophe there was the brushing of teeth and toilet paper.'

I found The Snakes very readable, utterly engrossing, thoughtful, intelligent and ultimately courageous in its eschewing of easy resolution and convention. I would hope to see it as a contender for major awards this year and I can recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

I found this a really bleak story with little optimism or possibility of redemption for any of the characters
.The people in the book seemed fairly standard - rich billionaire with shady past, beautiful, flawed wife and we'll paid lawyers. There was also an abused son, uptight son and rebellious daughter and the realisation that in the "right" hands money can be a tool for good and not just a corrupting influence.
I have never had contact with the French police but I was surprised to find them portrayed as quite so boorish and unhelpful.
I have enjoyed Ms Jones' other books, and as always, it is very well written but sadly this one wasn't for me.



Thank you to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book

Bea lives with her boyfriend Dan – she’s a counsellor, he’s an estate agent and would-be artist. They budget and just about manage financially. Taking a break from their jobs, they visit Bea’s brother Alex in a French hotel which he’s running.

Yet when they arrive, the hotel is derelict and Alex is inventing names in the guestbook, while trying to trap snakes.

There are snakes all around – above them, in the grass, and in the family. With the arrival of Bea and Alex’s extremely wealthy parents, Dan finds himself questioning everything he knew about Bea… and then with tragedy the two of them have to question the hotel itself, the life of Bea’s family, and their own role in it all.

An interesting mystery/thriller, which becomes more and more compelling the further you read. Well-defined characters and a clever story – recommended.

This is a really good story, though very dark. Bea and Dan are travelling through France and stop to visit Bea's brother at the hotel he runs. They find the place closed to the public, with Alex claiming he is renovating it. Then Bea's ultra rich parents arrive to visit. When tragedy strikes, family secrets are revealed, and greed and the power of money become the central themes. Don't read this if you want something light hearted! The ending left me totally drained! Thanks to NetGalley for a preview copy.
Copied to Goodreads.

My wife and I once stayed in a house in Èze in the south of France along with several other couples with children. On paper, the attic looked like the room of choice with a separate staircase and a bit of peace and quiet so we decided to rotate it during the holiday to give everyone a treat. It turned out to be nothing like that. Every night as you tried to go to sleep there were strange slithering noises above and I imagined snakes, hungry, poisonous snakes! We were falling over each other to generously pass the room to the next couple! I mention that because this novel has a house with snakes in the roof and the snakes are dangerous!

However, the real snake in this story, the one that gets under your clothes and winds itself in knots around you is money. The central character Bea is a normal, fairly plain and ordinary girl with a pleasant enough husband called Dan living a life without wealth, but not poverty stricken, in London. However her father, Griff, from whom she is largely estranged is monumentally rich, corrupted by his wealth and the pursuit of more. He is rude, boorish and offensive and she is well off away from him. Her brother Alex has not escaped and has been driven by parental abuse of many sorts into mental collapse. At the start of the novel, Bea and Dan take a few months off work to travel and go to visit Alex en route, at what is allegedly a hotel he's in the process of opening in central France.

It's clear when they arrive that Alex can't cope not only with life but also with an infestation of snakes in the roof. He is falling apart and, then, to make matters worse, the rich parents arrive. Without giving too much away, everything falls apart and the ending is hideously tragic. The driver for all of these events is money. The shambolic hotel is a front for money-laundering and poor, confused Alex is the messenger boy. Dan, another poor boy, is gradually drawn in to see what wealth can be like and finds it hard to resist. Bea sees him change and struggles to hold on both to him and her principles. Everyone finds the snakes first tempting them and then enveloping them and, ultimately, the snakes win...

It's a good story and Sadie Jones tells it well. She has the same talent as William Boyd for setting a convincing scene and populating foreign places with realistic characters and details. You feel as if you are in France. She also develops some thoroughly nasty characters and an ambivalent view of wealth and its corrupting effects without ever seeming to sermonise. Russ, who rolls up at the end and kind of rolls up the story is simply someone else corrupted by the lure of the cash. It's sad.

I found this book a very compelling read, I really enjoyed it. Highly recommended

Many thanks to Netgalley and Sadie Jones for the advanced copy of this book. I agreed to give my unbiased opinion voluntarily.

Bea has spent her whole life remaking herself as an individual separate from her family. She has forged her own career, found her own relationship with Dan, a man without connections or money, born and bred in Peckham, London. She lives as honestly and cleanly as she can, away from the corrupting influence of her father’s money and her mother’s shame; a shame Bea has done her best to bury deep inside.

The only thing is, she hasn’t been honest with Dan. He doesn’t know how rich her father is or what her mother did. Bea has chosen not to tell him.

Dan - fed up trudging into his estate agent job everyday when all he really wanted was to be an artist - suggests a holiday, one they can just about afford. Bea agrees.

Their first stop is to visit Bea’s brother, Alex. He has a hotel in France that he’s keen for them to see. But the hotel isn’t finished and has no guests. There is something eerie, unnerving about its masquerade.

Then Bea’s parents decide to visit and Alex takes off. He never returns. He’s found dead in his car that hangs, suspended in the branches of tree.

Slowly over time, it becomes clear that Alex’s death was suspicious and whilst Dan is lured into the ease of Bea’s family, attracted to the comfort of money, their relationship becomes more and more strained.

What was Alex doing for his father? Why doesn’t Bea like her mother? What else is hiding up in the loft with the snake traps?

The Snakes is a very dark and disturbing novel. Its examination of the workings of money is fascinating and deeply relevant to the way our world works. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it, however. I found the brutality and twisted emotional connections explored made me keener to put the novel down rather than pick it up and read on. This is unlike me. I’m not usually squeamish. I can’t quite put my finger on what didn’t appeal to me. Perhaps there was an underlying philosophy that too easily descended into pessimism. Perhaps, for me, there was too much of an emphasis on the thriller aspect of the plot. I’m not sure.

Out on the 7th March, The Snakes is a bright and ugly book that shakes up the reader. The smooth way in which the narrative moves between Bea and Dan, revealing the different ways in which they see their relationship and the world around them, is expertly done. This won’t be a novel for everyone though. I’m a lover of bleak, but this is bleak even for me. You’ll know if this appeals or not.

Next I’ll be reviewing A Well-Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler.

This book follows the poisonous family relations between Bea, her family, and husband. It’s an enthralling tale of corruption, mental health and money. I did feel at times the plot was slightly slow, but it did still captivate enough me to keep reading.
Overall worth a read, a very different book, that cleverly manages to tackle multiple topics in one story. I would give 3.5 stars, rounded this up to 4.
Thank you to Netgalley, Random House and Sadie for an advanced ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Sadie Jones mirrors a number of contemporary issues in this hugely engaging novel of family, marriage and the insidious corruption and deadly damage that the love of money wreaks. Beatrice Temple is a committed psychotherapist, married to the mixed race Dan, living a modest life in a small flat in London, struggling to make ends meet. Dan has been unable to establish a career as an artist, working in a soul destroying occupation as a estate agent which he can no longer bear as he finds himself quitting. Dan and Beatrice rent out the flat and take off for a European tour in their ramshackle car for 3 months. In France they visit Bea's brother, Alex, a drop out, with mental health and addiction issues, running a hotel in Burgundy. They find a dilapidated hotel that has never taken guests, and a frenetic and messed up Alex with a nest of snakes in the building. Bea is ostracised from her parents, but loves Alex, a person she has been unable to save from familial abuse around which a deafening silence has been maintained.

To Bea's discomfort, her parents arrive at Alex's hotel, and she and Dan make the fateful decision to stay, unaware of how their proximity to the family is to test their marriage, and precipitate tragedy and horror in its wake. Dan was aware Bea's family was wealthy, but respected her decision not to take any money from them, but he failed to appreciate just how rich they are until he hears of the private jet, recently sold. He feels short changed and misled by Bea, their life and his personal frustrations could have been eased so easily by her. Bea has learnt the hard way to develop an immunity to the lure and siren call of riches but Dan proves to be more susceptible, understandable given he grew up in poverty. Bea's father, Griff, is a disgraced and scandal ridden powerful billionaire, a self centred man with a swaggering sense of entitlement, a need for control, and dismissive of public services and the poor. Bea feels a hardness of heart when it comes to her mother, Liv, although Dan does not know why as Bea has never been forthcoming about the dark heart of her family.

Sadie Jones touches on important and epic issues in our contemporary world, the massive and growing gap between the haves and those living and sinking in their lives of penury and precariousness, the huge rise of corporations and billionaires refusing to pay their taxes, and the consequent fissures in the concept of a decent society as public services are slashed. Jones creates the decidedly human and authentic characters that illustrate her themes, and I appreciated the interspersed and metaphorical motif of the snakes, where the actual snakes are harmless. I loved the way she weaves in the seven deadly sins, the themes of the rooms in Alex's hotel. I found the ending dispiriting but nevertheless found the novel utterly gripping and thought provoking. I am not sure how many readers will connect with this novel, but I would like to recommend it highly. Many thanks to Random House Vintage.

I would be hard pressed to say what genre this book fits into. I spent most of the book trying to work out where on earth it was going, but finding myself compelled to keep reading and find out. The story starts off quite simply with Dan and Bea, who decide to take some time out from their everyday lives and go travelling for a couple of months. They stop at Bea's brother's hotel and as they do so, we find out more about her family history and why she has cut herself off from them. Things then start to twist and turn so you no longer know quite what kind of story you're reading, and while this is sometimes frustrating, it also keeps you hooked! An enjoyable, very different read.

The Snakes is perfectly passable without being overtly good / bad. An interesting family dynamic in the first quarter is violently disturbed and family tensions are ramped up. However, it does seem to drag on and all the character flaws become increasingly tiresome / unbelievable.

As for the ending, I almost knocked another star off. I think 2 1/2 would be a fair assessment were it possible.

A tightly told tale of love, the filthy lucre and family secrets.
I was immediately drawn into this tale of newlyweds Bea and Dan. Taking time away from their money worries, the couple decide to travel round Europe. Dan reluctantly agrees to drop in on Bea’s brother in a hotel he is setting up in France.
Right from their arrival in the area, a sense of foreboding and anxiety start to permeate the story and slowly the shocking web of family secrets is revealed.
Characterisation, style and plot development were all really excellent - I couldn’t put the book down - but I dropped one star in my rating because I found the end of the book rather disappointing.

Many thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an ARC of the book in return for an honest review.