Clara’s Verdict
Alice Feeney has built a formidable reputation for psychological thrillers that wrong-foot their readers at every turn, and Beautiful Ugly delivers exactly the kind of disorienting, atmosphere-saturated experience her fans have come to expect. The premise is deceptively simple: a novelist’s wife disappears without trace, and a year later he retreats to a remote Scottish island to write, only to begin receiving her old articles slipped under his door and catching glimpses of someone who looks uncannily like her. Is it grief distorting his perception? Is someone deliberately tormenting him? Or is the truth something more complicated and more dangerous than either possibility? Feeney handles the uncertainty with considerable skill, and the bleak coastal setting — mist, cliffs, shifting light, isolation — is superbly atmospheric. This is a novel that understands how marriages contain versions of each other that neither party can fully see.
About the Audiobook
The story centres on Grady Green, a successful author whose wife Abby — an investigative journalist — vanishes one ordinary evening. Everything is where it should be: her car, her phone, her fish and chips on the passenger seat. She is not. A year on, Grady has retreated to a remote Scottish island to write through the grief. Then the old articles begin to appear under his door. Then the sightings start. Then the question becomes whether any of this can be trusted.
The novel is structured as a dual narrative, weaving between Grady’s present-day unravelling and the backstory of the marriage — a portrait built in fragments that gradually assembles into something more troubling than the romantic ideal Grady has been mourning. Feeney writes about marriage with a cold, clear eye: the stories couples tell themselves about each other, the versions of people that love constructs and that honesty sometimes dismantles. The themes are rich. The Scottish island setting — isolated, atmospheric, historically freighted — gives the paranoia a physical correlative that the London-based opening could not provide.
The French-language edition, published by Audiolib and narrated by Anatole De Bodinat, runs at eight hours and twenty-seven minutes. French listeners have embraced it warmly, with the book’s sustained psychological tension translating effectively across languages. English-language editions are also available on UK platforms for anglophone listeners.
The Narration
The French audiobook is narrated by Anatole De Bodinat, whose measured, controlled delivery captures the mounting dread of Grady’s situation without over-performing the horror. De Bodinat has excellent instincts about pacing: the sequences of creeping uncertainty are allowed to accumulate naturally rather than being pushed toward a dramatic peak too early. Audiolib’s production quality is excellent — clean sound design, careful balance between interior monologue and dialogue. For English-language listeners, the original edition is available across all major UK platforms.
What Readers Say
The audiobook holds a rating of 4.1 from 253 listeners, with French-language reviews consistently positive. The majority describe it as a « parfait thriller » with genuine suspense sustained through to the final pages — one reader appreciated the « bon suspens jusqu’à la fin » (good tension right to the end) while recommending it without reservation. The minority dissent centres on a feeling that the supernatural elements — the visions, the amnesia — are emphasised too heavily and become repetitive rather than accumulative. On balance, the response suggests this is vintage Feeney: committed to its psychological premise, willing to take risks with narrative form, and not easily forgotten once you have finished it.
Who Should Listen?
Ideal for fans of psychological thrillers with a literary sensibility — readers who enjoy Feeney’s previous work such as Him and Her, or those drawn to authors like Shari Lapena, Lisa Jewell, or Gillian Flynn. The isolated Scottish setting will particularly appeal to those who enjoy bleak, atmospheric fiction where landscape and psychological state mirror each other. French-speaking listeners will find De Bodinat’s narration an especially strong match for the material’s tone. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel. Listen to Beautiful Ugly on Audible UK — atmospheric, twisty, and compulsively unsettling.
