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Under the Skin

By Michel Faber

(31)

| Paperback | 9781841954806

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Book Description

Isserley picks up hitchhikers with big muscles. She, herself, is tiny-like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. She has a remarkable face and wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. Her breasts are perfect; perhaps implants. SContinue

Isserley picks up hitchhikers with big muscles. She, herself, is tiny-like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. She has a remarkable face and wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. Her breasts are perfect; perhaps implants. She is strangely erotic yet somehow grotesque, vulnerable yet threatening. Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch of men-trailer trash and travelling postgrads, thugs and philosophers. But Isserley is only interested in whether they have families and whether they have muscles. Then, it's only a question of how long she can endure her pain-physical and spiritual-and their conversation. Michel Faber's work has been described as a combination of Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka, as Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan. At once humane and horrifying, Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory-our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion. A grotesque and comical allegory announcing the arrival of an exciting talent, rich and assured.

Critics

  • The hitchhiker's guide to the cleavage

    Under The Skin Michel Faber Canongate £9.99, pp296 Buy it at BOL Every morning, a woman named Isserley sets off on the A9 in Rosshire to look for hitchhikers. Although she's lived in a cottage near the Moray Firth for the past four years, the beauty ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • Flesh-creeping

    Under The Skin Michel Faber Canongate, £9.99, 296pp Buy it at BOL Like the sun in the Highlands, Michel Faber has been threatening for so long now that I had begun to think of him as a myth - a sly fabulist way up there in the heather invented by Edi ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

3 Reviews

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  • Strange but entertaining enough

    I was a bit disappointed reading this after the excellent Crimson Petal and the White. It's not the kind of book I would normally go for and I only chose it because I wanted to read something else by the same author.

    It's entertaining enough and it definitely gets better towards the end but I fou ... (continue)

    I was a bit disappointed reading this after the excellent Crimson Petal and the White. It's not the kind of book I would normally go for and I only chose it because I wanted to read something else by the same author.

    It's entertaining enough and it definitely gets better towards the end but I found the majority of the book pretty average. Sorry Michel! I'm sure you have a lot more up your sleeve for future books!

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    Danielle said on Jan 13, 2012 about the eBook edition | Add your feedback

  • Recommended to me by one of my colleagues as one of the most disturbing books they have ever read, I was keen to see what this was like. Initially the tale of a lone woman roaming the roads of Scotland, looking for hitchhikers seems to jar against your sense of the natural order of things. Soon this ... (continue)

    Recommended to me by one of my colleagues as one of the most disturbing books they have ever read, I was keen to see what this was like. Initially the tale of a lone woman roaming the roads of Scotland, looking for hitchhikers seems to jar against your sense of the natural order of things. Soon this though starts to make sense, as this dark tale takes you further than you think into its disturbing world. Well written with excellent twists, I have since read more by this author and continued to enjoy (in the loosest sense of the word) his work.

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    AkiraNone said on Mar 3, 2011 | Add your feedback

Book Details

  • Rating:
    (31)
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  • English Books
  • Paperback 296 Pages
  • Edition: New Ed
  • ISBN-10: 1841954802
  • ISBN-13: 9781841954806
  • Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
  • Pub date: May 03, 2004
  • Dimensions: 1290 mm x 839 mm Just how big is that?
  • Also available as: Hardcover, Others and eBook
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9781841954806 Paperback $12.86 -- The Book Depository
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