The Earthquake Bird - Hardcover

Jones, Susanna

3.42

1,875 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330485016 ISBN 13: 9780330485012

Publisher: Picador, 2001

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A haunting psychological crime novel, The Earthquake Bird is a debut which has caused an international sensation pre-publication."Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken up by an earth tremor. I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection - that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in the form of couple of policemen - for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month. I am simply relating the sequence of events as it happened. It has been an unusual day and I would hate to forget anything..."So begins this chilling novel set in Japan which reveals a murder on its first page and takes its readers into the mind of the chief suspect, Lucy Fly - a young, vulnerable English girl living and working in Tokyo as a translator. As Lucy is interrogated by the police she reveals her past to the reader, and it is a past which is dangerously ambiguous and compromising. A novel inbued with the chill of The Wasp Factory and the shock of The Sculptress, this is the debut of a major new talent.

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Review:

While many novelists are content these days to merely sketch in a few rudimentary characteristics for their protagonists, it's refreshing to encounter a book as ambitious as Susanna Jones' remarkable thriller The Earthquake Bird, which has no truck with such cursoriness. The central character in Jones' novel, Lucy Fly, is not only realised with richness and subtlety, but the reader is even allowed to change their mind about her as the revelations of the tale unfold--a rarity indeed these days. Not only that, Jones' book (her debut novel) is concisely written, making the amount she crams into this slim volume even more striking.

Set in Japan, The Earthquake Bird begins with an earth-tremor on its first page that echoes metaphorically through the book. Lucy is a young and insecure translator straining to survive in the bustling, impersonal city of Tokyo. She becomes the principal suspect in a murder case when her best friend Lily is killed. Initially, her dealings with the police present her as vulnerable and ill at ease (she has a quirky way of talking about herself in the third person), but revelations about her past begin to pull the metaphorical rug from beneath the reader's feet.

Jones' publishers invoke Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory in promoting the book, and the comparisons are not far-fetched. Like Banks' disturbing novel, the revelations here really do take the breath away. But there's more on offer than complex storytelling. Principally, this is a study of the mysteries of human character, and the ambiguity with which Lucy is presented has all of the skill that distinguished the brilliant novels of Iris Murdoch. Tokyo, too, is evoked with intriguing detail--the perfect backdrop for the steadily unfolding narrative:

The killer had a street stand selling noodles. He also had a dead body to dispose of. In order to avoid the fingerprint problem he had hacked off the corpse's hands. He then proceeded to boil the outer layers of skin off the hands by dropping them into the hot noodle broth, on the street, under the unknowing eyes of his hungry customers.

--Barry Forshaw

Review:

Praise for the Earthquake Bird: "An unforgettable debut."

"An examination of the slippery nature of truth and memory, obsessions and betrayals, all of which loses handles with confidence and skill."

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