The Earthquake Bird
Purchase from: Picador.com or Amazon.co.uk
Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken 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 a form of a 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 The Earthquake Bird, a haunting 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...
Why did Lucy leave England for the foreign anonymity of Japan ten years before, and what exactly had prompted her to sever all links with her family back home? She was the last person to see the murdered girl alive, so why was she not more forthcoming about the circumstances of their last meeting? As Lucy’s story unfolds, it emerges that secrets, both past and present, obsess her waking life.
'Shocking prose paired with sexual obsession': Read A N Wilson's World of Books column about The Earthquake Bird Telegraph.co.uk
‘The Earthquake Bird is an astonishingly accomplished debut...It is hard to believe that this skilfully constructed and beautifully written work is a first novel’. Sunday Telegraph
‘This spare, urgent debut is not only a polished crime novel, but a hymn to Tokyo and an awkwardly tender love story…The Earthquake Bird is distinguished by its alluring ambiguity’. Daily Telegraph
‘Jones renders Lucy’s painful realisation of lost love and missed opportunity with seductive delicacy’. Guardian
‘The sentences may be lean and spare, but the murder on the first page heralds a weight and menace to this story that’s strangely chilling...This is a very compelling debut. Elle
‘Fast paced and claustrophobic...a subtle portrait of how jealousy blooms from nothing’. The Times
‘This is the Japanese novel – obsessive, bordering on the surreal, replete with prosaic details that can be interpreted as clues, but clues to a mystery that remains mysterious.’ Observer
The Earthquake Bird was picked as one of 100 Books to Talk about for World Book Day 2008.