Susanna Jones
Photo by Nora Gomboss
Susanna Jones' novels have been translated widely and won awards including the Betty Trask Award, the John Creasey Dagger, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Fiction Uncovered. She has also written short stories, articles and is currently writing for screen.
Susanna has thirty years' experience as a teacher. From 2003 to 2018 she was the main fiction tutor on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London. Many of her former students have gone on to publish novels and win awards. She has taught students of all levels, from beginners to PhD students. She now specialises in teaching small workshop groups and one-to-one mentoring, in Brighton and online.
THE EARTHQUAKE BIRD has been adapted for film by Netflix, directed by Wash Westmoreland, starring Alicia Vikander and produced by Ridley Scott. It premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and Tokyo International Film Festival in 2019.
One of the best books I’ve read in recent years.
Jones slithers her sharpened icicle between your ribs before you realise you have been stabbed.
A. N. Wilson (on THE EARTHQUAKE BIRD)
Novels of psychological suspense hang on the delicacy of the writer's touch - that feathery brush- stroke that darkens a mood, heightens an action and brings a revealing word to a character's lips - and Susanna Jones has the touch. . . this meticulous stylist sets her alienated characters adrift in modern-day Japan and in spare, nuanced prose gently leads them into disaster.
New York Times
Susanna Jones writes in a plain, pellucid style, and uses it to tell a dark story. ..Jones evokes a sense of mystery and strangeness with the lightest of touches, and casts doubt on the reliability of her narrator in a manner reminiscent of Paul Auster. Experimental, teasing but always utterly readable.
Independent
Jones is a mistress of disguise, not just in her characterization and plotting, but in her blurring of the divisions between right and wrong. Hers isn’t quite the deliberate amorality of Patricia Highsmith, but she similarly denies us any easy options when it comes to taking sides for or against her protagonists. With Isabel, in The Missing Person’s Guide to Love, Jones has fashioned her most complex, involving heroine yet and by far her most audacious sleight of hand in terms of a storyteller. To call it a twist would be to devalue what is really a hidden undercurrent of the whole narrative; nevertheless the revelation, when it comes, is breathtaking.
Literary Review
Jones's fourth novel is an atmospheric, beautifully controlled account of intense female friendship and ambition. And it's also a gripping psychological thriller – the missing link, were one ever inclined to hunt for it, between Rosamund Lehmann's Dusty Answer and Joe Simpson's Touching the Void. Recommended.
Guardian
