Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne

David Sexton in the Evening Standard:

There’s been quite a spate of novels recently about people becoming severely unstuck abroad — holiday noir, a trend-spotting article called it last week.

If that’s a genre, its master is Lawrence Osborne. In the past few years, he has published fine novels about Westerners losing their bearings in Morocco, Macau and Cambodia (the excellent Hunters in the Dark). Beautiful Animals is another such tale of moral disorientation, his best version of it yet.

It’s set on the small Greek island of Hydra, once a boho hangout where in the Sixties Leonard Cohen bought a house for $1,500 but now a favoured retreat for the super-rich and the art world. Osborne wrote a sly, observant travel-piece about Hydra and its yacht-owning billionaires for the

New York Times in 2014 — and in this novel he brings together the privileged holidaying Westerners and a stranded would-be migrant.

More here.