The blurb reads:

"One summer's day in 1957, nineteen-year-old Lewis Aldridge stands alone at Waterford railway station. The only person awaiting his return is a fifteen-year-old girl called Kit Carmichael. Like him, she endured a childhood spent in the stifling atmosphere of an English village recovering from the ravages of the Second World War.

A decade earlier it was Lewis who waited for his father's homecoming from the war. His mother, a free-spirited and glamorous woman, holds husband and son in her thrall. But when tragedy strikes, Lewis and his father, unable to console one another, are torn apart by their grief.

Now, from the fractured remains of their old lives, Kit and Lewis must forge their own futures. As menacing as it is beautiful, The Outcast is a devastating portrait of transgression and redemption from an astonishing new voice".

The tension in The Outcast is almost unbearable. Stifling 1950s society is wonderfully portrayed through the story of a boy who goes off the rails after losing his mother. His father's inability to support him, to understand why he resorts to sullenness and self-harm, or to see why it is this lack of support and understanding that drives him to violence, is tragic.

Sadie Jones seemingly couldn't bear the unremitting grimness herself though so she gives the baddie a come-uppance and ends the book on a note of positivity which felt like a cop-out.

On the seats nearest the ticket barriers, on the concourse.