Sadie Jones’s fifth novel, The Snakes, was her first to move away from a historical backdrop: a thriller-cum-morality tale heavy with symbolism, where the strife in one family functioned as a microcosm of the deep divisions of late capitalism. Now she has followed it with Amy & Lan, another near-contemporary tale also focused on the damage inflicted, often unwittingly, within families.
When the novel opens in 2005, the two narrators of the title are both seven and living in a kind of commune at Frith, a Herefordshire farm bought by three middle-class families – the Connells, the Honeys and the Hodges – who have left city life in pursuit of the rural dream. Amy and Lan (short for Lachlan) exist as an inseparable unit, distinct from “the grown-ups” on one side and “the little kids” – all their younger siblings – on the other. “Usually I don’t really think about me and Amy being friends,” Lan says. “We’re always together and I don’t even notice her that much.” But one of the transitions that the novel charts over the course of five years is how the children, raised almost as twins, gradually grow aware of their separateness.
