Jenny Jackson’s novel has just come out and everyone is tagging her on Instagram. “I see that the post says, like, ‘this was such an easy read!’,” the Pineapple Street author tells me, before jokingly lowering her voice into a slightly threatening tone. “I’m like, ‘Easy? Easy read? Don’t you mean wonderfully sophisticated and deeply moving and thought-provoking?’ But then” – she lights up – “a huge part of me is like… ‘yes!’”
Having been a hotshot book editor for the past two decades – Gabrielle Zevin, Katherine Heiny, Kevin Kwan and Emily St John Mandel are among her authors – Jackson knows it takes “a certain kind of artistry” to craft a novel that people want to inhale in one sitting. Pineapple Street neatly slots into the space previously occupied by Sorrow and Bliss, Such a Fun Age and Fleishman Is in Trouble as this year’s essential smart summer read. But it will also – brace yourselves, British people – have us all talking about money. It charts the (quite vast) fortunes of the Stockton family, who live in Brooklyn Heights and probably own quite a lot of it. At the heart of the novel are three women: Darley, who has given up access to her trust fund so that her husband won’t have to sign a romance-killing prenup; Sasha, privately referred to as “the gold-digger” by the family she has married into; and Gen Z-er Georgiana, a charity worker beginning to think her inheritance might be obscene.
