Sadie Jones is the author of four novels, including Small Wars and the award-winning The Outcast. Her new book, The Snakes, is a dark thriller about the corrosive effect of money, greed and abuse on a wealthy London family.

The Snakes is the first book you’ve set in the present day. Did you feel a need to write a “way we live now” novel?
I was hoping not to. The idea of training a lens on the way we live and think now is daunting to me. I prefer to come at things sideways rather than right on the nose in capital letters. In many ways, the book is a morality tale and a story about what felt – when I was writing it in 2016 – and still feels like the rise of evil. I thought about setting it between the wars, because good people were caught up in evil times then, too. But I decided it had to be set today because of this feeling I have of being on a precipice, this feeling that mortal danger is all around us.

Why set it partly in France?
I love France, and it symbolises old Europe for me. It’s civilised, and with Brexit coming, there’s a nostalgia for that. So I wanted the book to feel post-European, like a goodbye to all that we’re leaving behind. I wanted to put it somewhere that feels like it’s dying.

Hence the dilapidated hotel where the characters stay?
Exactly, it’s all crumbling beneath their feet.

As well as a story about a family, it is also a novel about London right now, a city you portray as having its heart and soul ripped out by greedy property developers…
I’m a Londoner, born and brought up in World’s End [in Chelsea, west London], and when I was a child it was populated by butchers with sawdust on the floor, and writers… really scruffy. Of course there were bourgeois people and smart people up the road, but it was bohemian and cheap enough, and people actually lived there. People lived all over central London. I do grieve for that. Now it all looks like Mary Poppins: gorgeous buildings everywhere but there are no lights on, and it’s sad.

The book feels rooted in Greek tragedy, also Dante’s Divine Comedy, not least because your protagonists are named Beatrice and Dan...
It is really a Greek tragedy in lots of ways, and I wanted it to ask those ancient questions even though it’s a contemporary book. I thought about powerful Greek heroines, their strength and purity, and how it counted for nothing in a very male world. Bea is trying to be good but she is in a corrupt place, so she is ultimately powerless.

You conjure Bea’s super-rich parents brilliantly – they must be the most monstrous literary couple since Edward St Aubyn’s David and Eleanor Melrose. Where did they come from?
It’s just what people in that super-rich milieu are like, isn’t it? Evil is an unfashionable word, but it’s everywhere you look. Sometimes you just sense it in a room.

The atmosphere of malevolence is stoked by the way Dan, who is mixed race, encounters racism on a daily, almost hourly basis...
I have a mixed-race family, so I didn’t have to step far outside my own experience to write those scenes. I didn’t want to make too big a statement about it, but I needed to show his reality. The subtleties of his experience, and the specificity of the mixed-race experience are really underexplored in our society; we tend to be so binary about these things.

Which books are on your bedside table?
My Coney Island Baby by Billy O’Callaghan – his writing is just gorgeous. And I’ve got Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and Almost a Gentleman, John Osborne’s autobiography, which my mum gave me and I’m really looking forward to.

Which other writers do you admire?
Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker and Marilynne Robinson are probably my top three. I just think Pat Barker is extraordinary, and her Regeneration trilogy, which I read much later than everybody, are just extraordinary books. She’s such a quiet writer; there’s no bells and whistles with her prose.

What would you say is the last really great book you read?
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which again I’d been waiting years to read. I save big books for the summer, often, because you have the time to read all day then. Not that it’s a big book in terms of length, but an important book. I loved the sense you get when you’re reading that it’s the beautiful, tiny tip of the biggest iceberg.

Do you read on paper or a screen?
Always paper.

What kind of reader were you as a child?
You read what was on the shelves when there was nothing else to do. There was no YA, so your mother would say, “Now you’re old enough for Emily Brontë”, or, “Oh, Du Maurier will be a good way in.” So I read everything. I never liked school stories, perhaps because I hated school. I loved CS Lewis, Frances Hodgson Burnett and those very moral Victorian novels. Children like books about good and bad.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a present?
It was one I got this Christmas. I’d been listening to Michelle Obama’s Becoming on audiobook, and I was obsessed and tormenting my children, trying to brainwash them with her magical qualities. So for Christmas they got me this book of pictures of her, which was such a sweet gesture. They did it to tease me because she’s my girl-crush, but it was just a very lovely thing too.

How do you organise your books? Are they alphabetised?
Not at all. They’re all just muddled up. One thing I do have is the shelf of shame, of books I meant to read, that were recommended to me, and I haven’t read and should have.

Which book would you give to a young person?
I recently gave my daughter Normal People, by Sally Rooney, but she doesn’t count as a young person, does she? She’s just turned 22. With young children, I try to give them books that seem to describe them in some way, so they’ll be able to see themselves. I think that’s what hooks you in.

What book might people be surprised to see on your bookshelves?
Jilly Cooper’s Riders. It’s one of the best books ever, I just love it. People are really snobby about Jilly Cooper but she knows what she’s doing. She’s so accurate about people, and she’s so funny. I’d stand up for Jilly any time.

• The Snakes by Sadie Jones is published by Vintage (£14.99). To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99