"Under the Skin" Michael Faber
Kudos for Aidan for this recommendation. Michael Faber is Dutch born, he emigrated to Australia and lived there for a good long stretch from 1967 to 1993 and then moved to Scotland. He's got a green stamp from me. I watched the film adaptation and then straight after read this book, which is his debut novel. A thriller sci-fi set in the Highlands. Gloriously spooky and provocative. I highly recommend it and I can't wait to read it again. Here's how Good Reads describes it: "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."
