Imprint: Vintage
Published: 07/06/2018
ISBN: 9781784700379
Length: 304 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 19mm x 129mm
Weight: 213g
RRP: £8.99
The best intentions can be deadly
During a white-hot summer on the idyllic Greek island of Hydra, two girls fall into one another’s lives to devastating effect.
When Samantha, a young, impressionable American, meets Naomi, a Brit with a taste for danger, their relationship quickly takes on a special intensity. Amid the sun, sea and high society of island life, their imaginations are sparked when one day they find a young Arab man, Faoud, washed up on shore, a casualty of the crisis raging across the Aegean. But when their seemingly simple plan to help the stranger goes wrong, all must face the horrific consequences they have set in motion.
Imprint: Vintage
Published: 07/06/2018
ISBN: 9781784700379
Length: 304 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 19mm x 129mm
Weight: 213g
RRP: £8.99
Both impossible to put down and beautifully written: a great combo
An astute, unsentimental critique of the contemporary world in crisis... Osborne handles surface and depth with immense skill, as only great writers can do. Beautiful Animals is his most accomplished book so far -- a big, clever, crazed beast of a novel
Often almost literally bristling with menace… his Hydra is rugged with physical immediacy. Silhouetted against it, emotions fluctuate, sexual frissons flicker back and forth, destinies tremble in the balance… It’s the brilliance with which Osborne conjures all this up that leaves you eager to see where his nomadic imagination will take him next
Osborne is a startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice… The novel takes on the tone of an existential noir, evoking writers like Jean-Patrick Manchette and Georges Simenon... An heir to Graham Greene... he shares with Greene an interest in what might be called the moral thriller
Complex and thrilling, Beautiful Animals confirms Osborne as one of Britain’s very best novelists
Beautiful Animals is terrifically well constructed, written with mean authority, brilliantly evocative about place … A masterpiece of disaffection
Spare, subtle… brilliantly achieved
Osborne is interested in what his characters do when events are wrested out of their control, his narratives unfurling like a set of carefully lined-up dominoes… It’s exciting for sure, but cuts closer to the bone than Osborne’s previous novels and is all the more distressing and depressing for it
Superlatively gripping… Osborne plunges his characters far from the luminescent surface and into the darkest depths
Cracking Greek noir