I always worry that I’m clinging to the term with the tips of my fingers because my novels don’t seem to be typical psychological thrillers.
— British author Amanda Jennings, on her novel The Cliff House
The Cliff House Amanda Jennings HarperCollins LONDON The first thing you notice about top-selling novelist Amanda Jennings is that she has shown up for her interview wearing a blackand-white T-shirt dominated by the image of a skull.
“That’s the dark side of me,” she says with a laugh. “I have difficulty convincing anyone that I have this dark soul. That’s because I like to smile. So I wear this horrible Tshirt.”
And she does have a thing about skulls, although there isn’t yet one on her writing table to inspire her while working on one of her tautly paced psychological thrillers. “But I have a glass one on a table in the hallway — my husband gave it to me for Valentine’s Day.”
There’s also a ram’s head on the wall of her home in Oxfordshire. “My poor mother considers my obsession with skulls a little dubious,” Jennings says. “Some people consider them morbid, but I don’t. I’m not sure I’d like to see one in real life, but I think they’re rather attractive.”
There’s a surprising coziness to this conversation — a coziness that is definitely not reflected in The Cliff House, the 45-year-old novelist’s acclaimed new thriller about the devastating consequences of a friendship between two troubled teenage girls.
The novel is set in Cornwall, the most westerly and most mysterious of England’s southern counties, and focuses on an unhappy 15-year-old girl named Tamsin and her obsession with a striking Art Deco house high on the Cornish cliffs.
“I initially had the idea of this free-spirited barefoot girl running along the cliff and being confronted with the glamour of this house and its lifestyle and becoming obsessed with it,” Jennings says. “But I also wanted something more complex and dark. So I went with the idea that her father had died and that this house wasn’t just a beautiful escape but represented everything she didn’t have.”
Six years after her father’s death, Tamsin still mourns his loss and is driven by memories of this alluring house, which the two of them once surreptitiously visited. So while her widowed mother struggles to keep an impoverished family together, Tamsin finds herself idealizing the wealthy lifestyle of the Cliff House and its owners. She dreams of becoming like them.
Tamsin’s unexpected friendship with the daughter of the house, the resentful and desperately unhappy Edie, seems to offer a portal into an exciting new world and the promise of true happiness. Instead, Tamsin is drawn into the orbit of a dangerously dysfunctional family and into an emotional inferno she is ill-equipped to confront.
“I clearly had in my head the vision of one family struggling financially and emotionally but bound together by these strong bonds of love and respect,” Jennings says. “They have everything a normal family would aspire to — but have been unlucky in losing their linchpin.
“And then there’s this other family that has everything Tamsin aspires to. They have a beautiful house, great parties, Facebook, Instagram, all the trappings — but they ’re really three separate, damaged people.”
Jennings, frequently lauded for her insight into character, is quite content to be labelled as a writer of psychological thrillers.
“I don’t mind at all,” she says cheerfully. “I’m doing very well with that label.”
Indeed, she is. Jennings, who once planned a career in architecture before turning to writing, captured international attention with her debut novel, Sworn Secrets. Her third novel, In Her Wake, made the New York Times best-seller list in 2016.
“But I always worry that I’m clinging to the term with the tips of my fingers because they don’t seem to be typical psychological thrillers.”
That’s because she also turns her lens on society. Cornwall, a county she loves, serves as a microcosm for her concerns. “There are pockets that are hugely affected by poverty,” she says. But there is also growing gentrification and trendy places to visit.
“I’m interested in class in this country and the way people use it as a way of containing and excluding people,” Jennings says. “I had a privileged upbringing myself. But then you get older and the blinkers are taken away from you and you see that life is not like that outside this gilded world you live in.’
So The Cliff House also emerges as a social document as the vulnerable and unseeing Tamsin is drawn into a world she yearns for and to which she will never belong. Or will this really be the case? Jennings leaves it up to readers to decide as she brings her book to a shocking but psychologically convincing conclusion.
The Cliff House is also very much a novel of place. Cornwall summons up mystery for Jennings, just
as it did for the legendary Daphne du Maurier when she wrote Rebecca.
And if there’s a tinge of the supernatural here — well again, this is Cornwall.
“The county is mysterious,” Jennings says. “Even as you cross into it from Devon, you feel the change. As a child visiting my grandparents there, I was completely convinced there were spirits around. It has such an eerie atmosphere. Legend and mythology are wrapped into every aspect. Nothing is quite what it seems.”
Which brings her back to the symbolism of a skull.
“It’s underneath us all. At the end of the day it takes away all our material trappings and emotion — it takes everything.”