Beautiful Animals: A Novel by Lawrence Osborne (English) Paperback Book

Description: Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne On a summer break on the Greek island of Hydra, two girls make a startling discovery: a young Arab man washed up on shore, a migrant from Syria and a casualty of the crisis raging against across the sea. When a simple plan to help the stranger goes horrifically wrong, all must face the consequences they have set in motion. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description "Lets not mince words. This is a great book. Truly difficult to put down... sophisticated, smart and uncomfortable, and the story is cracking." – Lionel Shriver, Washington Post "Startlingly good...Osborne has been described as an heir to Graham Greene, and he shares with Greene an interest in what might be called the moral thriller." – Katie Kitamura, New York Times Book Review"A seductively menacing new thriller by Lawrence Osborne...who unites Graham Greenes fondness for foreign soil with Patricia Highsmiths fascination with the nastier coils of the human psyche." –NPRs "Fresh Air"FINANCIAL TIMES SUMMER PICK 2017GUARDIAN BEST HOLIDAY READS 2017 On a hike during a white-hot summer break on the Greek island of Hydra, Naomi and Samantha make a startling discovery: a man named Faoud, sleeping heavily, exposed to the elements, but still alive. Naomi, the daughter of a wealthy British art collector who has owned a villa in the exclusive hills for decades, convinces Sam, a younger American girl on vacation with her family, to help this stranger. As the two women learn more about the man, a migrant from Syria and a casualty of the crisis raging across the Aegean Sea, their own burgeoning friendship intensifies. But when their seemingly simple plan to help Faoud unravels all must face the horrific consequences they have set in motion.In this brilliant psychological study of manipulation and greed, Lawrence Osborne explores the dark heart of friendship, and shows just how often the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions. Author Biography LAWRENCE OSBORNE is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, and Hunters in the Dark, and of six books of nonfiction. His short story "Volcano" was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2012, and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Forbes, Harpers, and other publications. He lives in Bangkok. Review Praise for Beautiful Animals:"[A] startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice… Osborne has been described as an heir to Graham Greene, and he shares with Greene an interest in what might be called the moral thriller." – Katie Kitamura, New York Times Book Review"Lets not mince words. This is a great book. Truly difficult to put down, the novel exerts a sickening pull. Its climax and resolution will not disappoint. The social perspective is sophisticated, smart and uncomfortable, and the story is cracking." – Lionel Shriver, Washington Post "The appeal of Osbornes nomadic fiction is that it cannot be easily placed in the contemporary British literary scene. His distinguished palette includes the big yearning of Scott Fitzgerald and the decadent hedonism of Charles Baudelaire. Most impressive of all, and there is much to be impressed by, Osborne handles surface and depth with immense skill, as only great writers do. Beautiful Animals is his most accomplished book so far – a big, clever, crazed beast of a novel." – Deborah Levy, Financial Times"A seductively menacing new thriller by Lawrence Osborne... who unites Graham Greenes fondness for foreign soil with Patricia Highsmiths fascination with the nastier coils of the human psyche... What makes Osbornes work so compelling is that its ruthlessly unpredictable. This is one writer who knows that life, even on a rapturously lovely Greek island, is no day at the beach." –NPRs "Fresh Air""A sun-drenched summer novel with a shadow of death hanging over it." — NPRs "All Things Considered""As a thriller, a real page-turner, and as social commentary an astutely glancing approach to Europes migration crisis. Rivetingly well written. Osborne...has a fine feel for the complexities of culture clash." – Financial Times (Summer Picks 2017) "Beautiful Animals is terrifically well constructed, written with mean authority, brilliantly evocative about place, successfully engaging us with its characters without ever requiring us to like them. A masterpiece of disaffection, all round." – Evening Standard (London)"Sensuous and elegantly written... a masterful and sophisticated psychological thriller that explores moral ambiguity from multiple perspectives." – BBC Culture (best beach reads of 2017) "Beautifully crafted and psychologically astute, Osbornes latest novel takes us on another journey through a heart of moral darkness. A rich, disturbing, and compelling read."– Kirkus (starred review)"Soaked in lush descriptions of the breathtaking Greek countryside... brilliantly paced." – Booklist (starred review)Praise for Lawrence Osborne: "Osbornes writing is uncomfortably well observed; his story is sickeningly, addictively headlong" – Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin "If the purpose of a novel is to take you away from the everyday and show you something different, then Osborne is succeeding, and handsomely" – Lee Child, New York Times Book Review "Mr. Osborne has a keen and sometimes cruel eye for humans and their manners and morals… Surprising and dark and excellent" – New York Times "Elegant, stylish… edgy and gripping. Written with unfailing precision and beauty" – Neel Mukherjee, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Lives of Others "Sumptuous and sinister, languorous and tense" —Sunday Times (UK) Review Quote Praise for Beautiful Animals : "[A] startlingly good observer of privilege, noting the rites and rituals of the upper classes with unerring precision and an undercurrent of malice... Osborne has been described as an heir to Graham Greene, and he shares with Greene an interest in what might be called the moral thriller." - Katie Kitamura, New York Times Book Review "Lets not mince words. This is a great book. Truly difficult to put down, the novel exerts a sickening pull. Its climax and resolution will not disappoint. The social perspective is sophisticated, smart and uncomfortable, and the story is cracking." - Lionel Shriver, Washington Post "The appeal of Osbornes nomadic fiction is that it cannot be easily placed in the contemporary British literary scene. His distinguished palette includes the big yearning of Scott Fitzgerald and the decadent hedonism of Charles Baudelaire. Most impressive of all, and there is much to be impressed by, Osborne handles surface and depth with immense skill, as only great writers do. Beautiful Animals is his most accomplished book so far - a big, clever, crazed beast of a novel ." - Deborah Levy, Financial Times " A seductively menacing new thriller by Lawrence Osborne... who unites Graham Greenes fondness for foreign soil with Patricia Highsmiths fascination with the nastier coils of the human psyche ... What makes Osbornes work so compelling is that its ruthlessly unpredictable. This is one writer who knows that life, even on a rapturously lovely Greek island, is no day at the beach." -NPRs "Fresh Air" "A sun-drenched summer novel with a shadow of death hanging over it." -- NPRs "All Things Considered" "As a thriller, a real page-turner, and as social commentary an astutely glancing approach to Europes migration crisis. Rivetingly well written. Osborne...has a fine feel for the complexities of culture clash ." - Financial Times (Summer Picks 2017) " Beautiful Animals is terrifically well constructed, written with mean authority, brilliantly evocative about place, successfully engaging us with its characters without ever requiring us to like them. A masterpiece of disaffection , all round ." - Evening Standard (London) "Sensuous and elegantly written... a masterful and sophisticated psychological thriller that explores moral ambiguity from multiple perspectives." - BBC Culture (best beach reads of 2017) "Beautifully crafted and psychologically astute, Osbornes latest novel takes us on another journey through a heart of moral darkness. A rich, disturbing, and compelling read."- Kirkus (starred review) "Soaked in lush descriptions of the breathtaking Greek countryside... brilliantly paced." - Booklist (starred review) Praise for Lawrence Osborne: "Osbornes writing is uncomfortably well observed; his story is sickeningly, addictively headlong" - Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin "If the purpose of a novel is to take you away from the everyday and show you something different, then Osborne is succeeding, and handsomely" - Lee Child, New York Times Book Review "Mr. Osborne has a keen and sometimes cruel eye for humans and their manners and morals... Surprising and dark and excellent" - New York Times "Elegant, stylish... edgy and gripping. Written with unfailing precision and beauty" - Neel Mukherjee, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Lives of Others "Sumptuous and sinister, languorous and tense" -- Sunday Times (UK) Excerpt from Book Hydra One High up on the mountainside above the port, the Codringtons slept through the dry June mornings in their villa shaded by cypresses and by awnings rolled down over the doors. They lay in pajama-clad splendor among their Byzantine icons and paintings of Hydriot sea captains, unaware that their daughter Naomi had taken up early swims, that she dressed in the cool of her own room an hour before daylight, half reflected in a wishbone mirror. She put on a cambric shirt with French cuffs and a leather thong necklace, slung a small denim beach bag over her shoulder and then made her way down the whitewashed steps that ran below her fathers house. She walked to the port along a narrow helix of steps, through landings with iron grilles and sudden views of the sea where the stone arches retained the nocturnal cool; the wild lots with their signs reading Poleitai and the marital bedrooms now open to the sky and filled with motionless butterflies. Down by the town Naomi passed the Hotel Miranda with its chained anchor strung against a wall and a door that opened into a secret garden sunk in a blue glow of plumbago. A priest sat on the step as if waiting for something, and he gave her a nod. They knew each other without knowing each -others names. The holy beard that remained the same, the girl who walked with silent steps summer after summer as if she couldnt hear anything around her. At the toy port she walked around the overpriced yachts without stopping at the cafes. She climbed above the tourist harbor and out onto a path above the sea, silent in her espadrilles at first, then singing and counting her own steps. She passed a row of cannons set into the wall, the monument to Antonios Kriesis, wind-shredded agaves leaning like totems out of the hillside. She went around the island northward on a track that led to the little bay called Mandraki, a place where her Greek stepmother often said the waters never moved. She had never discovered why piles of rusted machinery lay by the side of the path, boilers and girders, cement mixers long ago pitched among the flowers. At the crest of the hill above Mandraki there were a few imposing villas with long walls around them, their door knockers shaped as heads of Athena. Below it the bay held a run-down little resort called the Mira Mare where, on the beach, a small seaplane had been dragged up and its windows covered with screens. Frames of parasols with no straw lay in disorder in the lot behind the beach, but past Mandraki the path was uncontaminated. It wound toward Zourva through scrubland hillsides, and there great fields of stones swept down to the water in a blistering wind. The water was almost black before the sun rose high enough to lighten it. This was where Naomi always swam, sometimes half hoping to die, until she was too cold to continue and her fingers went numb. She never told her father and Phaine about her morning swims and there was no need for them to know. What would they have said? Solitude was a value that meant nothing to them. They wouldnt have understood that every morning she felt the same listless and vague expectation, the same dissatisfaction with the tempo of the world as she knew it. She sometimes thought that she had internalized this perpetual disappointment since childhood, though she could never quite put her finger on her unconscious reason for doing so. Or perhaps it was the island itself. The summers that went on forever, the afternoons too hot for purely animal activities. And worse even than these, the ancient bohemians whom her father and stepmother mingled with. The stunning emptiness of it didnt even bore her; it made her feel superior to hedonism and the islands but without being able to suggest an alternative to herself. Afterward she dried herself on the stony slopes among the wasps. She wrote in the small diary she carried with her while across the straits lay the low and promising shadow of the mainland. Beyond the haze lay the Argolid and the jetty at Metochi, both too far off to really see. It was usually eight or so by the time she had walked back to Mandraki and wandered into the resort looking for a coffee. High above the cove, raw mountainsides held up a white sanctuary in the first sunlight. She had always, during her childhood, imagined saints living there, hermits beaten by winds. But they had never appeared. The boys laying out the umbrellas and regimented loungers on the strip of sand knew her by now. The flirtations had subsided and they regarded her increasingly with a sullen scepticism because she had, a hundred and one times, rebuffed their advances. Before long, her eye was drawn to the lines of navy towels spread out on the sun loungers in the heat. It was shabby but secluded; sometimes the former was the price for the latter. The bay was so small that the ocean in front of it possessed a wide-angle immensity in comparison with the cramped beach. There, in any case, two women had already arrived, clambering down from the path with their beach bags, straw hats quivering as they moved, with the prudent agility of beetles. They lay on two loungers and the boys came down to them with trays of iced water, and it was clear that they came there every day and that the staff knew them well. They probably ordered breakfast and lunch with plenty of alcoholic drinks in between, because there was a familiarity in the manner of the Greeks. The resort was dying, paying non-guests were as vital as guests. It was an older woman and a young one, perhaps a mother and daughter. But Naomi didnt recognize them from the endless parties to which her father and stepmother were invited and to which she also subjected herself since there was nothing else to do on the island. They werent famous, then, and they werent the Beautiful People and Jimmie and Phaine probably didnt know them either. Nevertheless, here they were, drinking their coffee out of big blue cups and flicking away the flies with--of all things--a pair of tropical-weather fly whisks. The girl was remarkably fine, slender, spun-gold hair, too white for that sun, which made her eyes look even more desperate and avid. When the light hit them they gave off the inhuman glow of blue gemstones. The whisks were amusing and she inwardly approved, even when the accents floated over and seemed to suggest they were American. So they were, and before their coffee was consumed they had looked up at the British girl with her yogurt and honey on a wooden spool and their eyes filled with a light and homely curiosity. You too, at Mandraki? The female half of the Haldane family had discovered the cove the very first day they arrived on the boat from Piraeus. They had gone on a long walk around the island themselves, without Mr. Haldane, and if Amy thought about it she would have had to admit to herself that she always made the best discoveries when her husband wasnt around to spoil it. "It was Samantha who found it--she asked the cleaning women at the villa, which was very clever. But I think you got here before us." "Ive been coming here for years," Naomi said with deliberate weariness. "So you know--" The other girl was younger than Naomi, maybe nineteen or twenty to her twenty-four, with eyes that were steady and cool: perhaps like herself a student of human beings and their calamities. "You live here?" she said, calmly interrupting her mother. "My father has a house. Hes had it since the eighties." "Lord," the mother said. "Weve stumbled on an expert. Hes really been here that long? So you must have grown up here." "Summers." "Summers on the island. We have a summer house on an island in Maine almost as nice as this one. But were New Yorkers. Maybe we know your father?" She was a little eager, and Naomi had to tamp her down. "I dont think so. My father and stepmother are quite odd socially." "My husband, you know--hes recuperating from an injury. He came here to heal, and it didnt seem like a bad idea. Hes recovering already--wouldnt you say, Sam?" "Hes already walking around on his bad foot." Naomi moved to the lounger next to theirs. She stretched out, and there was something in the unfurling of her body that drew attention to itself. A narcissist, the mother thought. "I speak Greek," Naomi said, smiling. "I can order anything you want. They have a lot of things off menu." The mother looked up at the waiters by the bar, and her mouth wavered. "What about yogurt?" she murmured, pointing to Naomis abandoned breakfast. "I wouldnt mind some yogurt." "Yaourti," Naomi called over sharply . "Me meli." The heat crept to the back of their necks, and when it settled in behind their ears it refused to relinquish its quiet grip. Two trees hovered at the crest of the hillside, burning in their own gray light. They could sense dogs still asleep beneath them though they couldnt be seen, and Naomi asked quietly what was wrong with Mr. Haldane. "He went into a cage of monitor lizards at the zoo," the girl said without expression, "and one of them bit his foot. It severed the tendons, and they have bacterial agents in their saliva." "Sam, really." The truth was he had fallen off a ladder while painting a greenhouse near Blue Hill. "Its embarrassing. Jeffrey is such a fool with ladders. But he broke his hip and his foot." "No lizards?" Amy turned to her daughter. "I dont think there were any involved." "He was in a wheelchair for a month," Samantha said, "and now hes on an island with no cars or bikes. He said that was the whole point--it would force him to walk. But now that were here--" "He just sits in his chair painting all day." "Well," Naomi s Details ISBN0553447394 Author Lawrence Osborne Pages 304 Language English Year 2018 ISBN-10 0553447394 ISBN-13 9780553447392 Format Paperback Short Title Beautiful Animals Subtitle A Novel Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2018-04-17 NZ Release Date 2018-04-17 US Release Date 2018-04-17 UK Release Date 2018-04-17 Publisher Hogarth Press Publication Date 2018-04-17 Imprint Hogarth Press DEWEY 823.914 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137921042;

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