Abroad
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It all started very simply: A girl packed a suitcase full of soap and clean underwear and went to Italy. She was young--open as an empty highway. She met some people there. Love happened. And then, her ending began.
Grifonia, Italy. Home to thousands of years of secrets. Upon entering those ancient walls for her year abroad, Tabitha Deacon is entranced. And under the influence of a new, wealthy group of friends from her program, Taz quickly falls into a life of secretive, eccentric parties in abandoned cathedrals and medieval villas that are like nothing she's ever imagined. But Claire, Taz's plainspoken, unsettlingly beautiful roommate, is worried that Taz isn't really suited to her new bacchanalian lifestyle. A true friend, Claire wants to get to know Taz as she really is. Then, when both girls fall in love with the same quiet Italian with an odd, undisclosed past, everyone's morals are called into question. As the girls' boundaries disappear, Taz and Claire slide toward a terrifying end that seems almost inevitable--as if there is a force of history manipulating them from beneath the ancient city herself.
With a mesmerizing, steady hand, Crouch serves up a new novel that is part murder mystery, part modern Henry Jamesian exploration of the moral traps of modern girlhood. A page-turning, literary thriller in the best tradition, delivered with the dark wit and sure language the novelist has become known for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A mystery based on the Amanda Knox saga unfolds in this strong fifth novel from the author of Girls in Trucks. Tabitha ("Taz") Deacon, an Irish student studying abroad in Grifonia, Italy, finds herself caught up in the glamorous lives of a trio of beautiful, and close, fellow students while also nurturing a friendship with her quirky American flatmate, Claire. As Taz spends more time with the Brit Four Society the nickname bestowed upon her quartet by its leader, Jenny Cole she becomes increasingly aware of tension beneath the surface. Why don't the girls let Taz pay for anything? How do they know people in such positions of power? Why do the other girls seem afraid of Jenny? And at the center of the plot is the beautiful, odd Claire, who will be inextricably bound to Taz's fateful experience. Taz's friendships develop and then unravel against a backdrop of ancient history, in a town that has plenty of its own underlying tension. The similarities to the Amanda Knox story are myriad, and at times distracting, but Crouch explores an overshadowed element of that case: the victim, her thoughts and dreams and mistakes, as well as those she'll never be able to have or make. "We were all alive, and we loved and hated and lived brilliant, messy existences," Taz says.
