The Uninvited (35 page)
In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.
‘Unashamedly gleeful: a kind of topsy-turvy Jane Eyre with added time travel ... Sit back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy’
Daily Mail
War Crimes for the Home
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
‘You know what they say about GIs and English girls’ knickers,’ ran the wartime joke, ‘One Yank and they’re off.’ When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn’t normally do – evil things, some of them – because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it’s payback time. In her old folks’ home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed and love.
‘Breathtakingly coarse, wryly amusing and gut-wrenchingly tragic’
Marie Claire
The Paper Eater
Meet Hannah Park, slave to the democracy machine, and Harvey Kidd, the man the system spat out. Atlantica, a world of compulsive consumption, fervent Utopianism, emotional discovery, and love on the rocks. Torn from his family, exiled from his native island, and imprisoned on the former Disney ship Sea Hero, one-time computer whiz Harvey Nash has found solace in the voodoo art of papier-mache. But as the execution date of his violent cellmate approaches, he is confronted with daily reminders of the wrongful sentence meted out to him by the consumer-dedicated system he once voted for. In a witty, satirical vision of the future, Jensen evokes a world of rampant consumerism, blind obedience and virtual love.
‘Sparkling ... sharp, funny and richly imagined, this is as timely a warning about rampant consumerism as Orwell’s
1984
was about state control’
Sunday Express
Ark Baby
Shortlisted for the
Guardian
Fiction Prize
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
Since the year all British women became infertile, Bobby Sullivan’s London veterinary clinic has been packed with primate ‘children’ and, speaking as an alpha male, he’s sick to death of them. Hoping to reincarnate himself, he moves north, but finds there is no escape from the Darwinian imperative – or from the sexual pull of the luscious twins Rose and Blanche. As the legacy of the girls’ ancestor, Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, begins to connect with a century of history, religion, and evolutionary theory, new hope looms for the nation's future. Pointing the finger of destiny firmly at Bobby...
‘Superb … A complex, intelligent novel which draws upon a vast array of ideas without ever losing coherence … magnificently crowded, wonderfully funny fiction’
Daily Telegraph
Egg Dancing
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
With only a schizophrenic mother and a militantly hostile sister for backup, Hazel Sugden, food-splattered mum and queen of low self-esteem, is palpably unfit to save the future of mankind as we know it. But when embryology, psychiatry and religion clash over the miracle designer drug Genetic Choice, the dysfunctional trio is propelled into action with explosively comic results…
‘An assured, hilarious and insightful novel … propelled along by the comic rhythm of the writing, you’re carried on a crazy journey you won’t be sorry you took’
Time Out
First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by Liz Jensen
The moral right of the author has been asserted