Description

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.

Publisher Review

Cracking Greek noir * Guardian * Superlatively gripping... Osborne plunges his characters far from the luminescent surface and into the darkest depths -- Anita Sethi * i * 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 -- Lucy Scholes * Independent * Spare, subtle... brilliantly achieved -- Frances Wilson * Times Literary Supplement * Beautiful Animals is terrifically well constructed, written with mean authority, brilliantly evocative about place ... A masterpiece of disaffection -- David Sexton * Evening Standard * Complex and thrilling, Beautiful Animals confirms Osborne as one of Britain's very best novelists -- Anthony Gardner * Mail on Sunday * 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 * New York Times Book Review * 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 -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times * 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 -- Deborah Levy * Financial Times * Both impossible to put down and beautifully written: a great combo -- Lionel Shriver * Observer Books of the Year *