Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife as she’s driving home to share some exciting news. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by a cliff edge, the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there . . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible: a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change, but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change, but they do.

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Beautiful Ugly’ was a five-star read with great storytelling, great narration, great suspense, and a clever, satisfying conclusion.

‘Beautiful Ugly’ was my first Alice Feeney novel and it was astonishingly good. Given that it was about a recently widowed thriller writer retreating to a remote, barely inhabited island, I’d expected a bookish domestic psychological thriller. To my surprise, the book had quite a spooky, menacing atmosphere from the start, more like a slow-burn horror novel than a domestic mystery.

The story is told mostly as a first person, present-day account by the author Grady Green, narrated by Richard Armitage, interspersed with first person some-time-earlier accounts from an unnamed woman, narrated by Tuppence Middleton. I was drawn in immediately, both by Alice Feeney’s excellent writing and by the perfectly pitched narration.

From the start, I felt I couldn’t trust what I was being told by Grady Green. I made allowances for his grief and It wasn’t that I thought he was lying. It was more that he seemed like a man who habitually avoided unpleasant truths. Even so, I was engaged enough with him to feel anxious on his behalf as the events on the island started to feel more and more menacing in subtle, non-dramatic but deeply disturbing ways.

The sense of menace was increased by the slices of historical narrative told from a woman’s point of view. They were vivid and tense but I couldn’t identify whose story was being told or how their story related to Grady Green. The only thing that was clear was that these slices of life were strung together by a thread of misogyny. Given that Grady was the only man on an island populated by women, the narratives added to the sense of non-specific threat.

For much of the book I had no idea where the story was going but I knew that I absolutely had to find out.

I loved how hard it was to tell truth from lies, deception from delusion and paranoia from necessary caution. 

The ending left my head spinning, it was so surprising and so perfect.

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Alice Feeney is the author of seven best-selling novels, including: Beautiful Ugly, His & Hers, Sometimes I Lie, Rock Paper Scissors,. and Daisy Darker.

Her books have been translated into over thirty-five languages, and have been optioned fro screen adaptations His & Hers is currently in production with Netflix, starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal.

Alice was a BBC journalist for fifteen years.