A Beautiful Family
The heart-stopping summer mystery for fans of The Lovely Bones and Little Fires Everywhere
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3.9 • 43 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
*A New York Times Best Thriller *
‘Atmospheric, disturbing and beautifully evoked’ – Daily Mail
‘Page-turning . . . I absolutely loved this’ – Liane Moriarty, bestselling author of Here One Moment
‘Riveting . . . it held me captive’ – Hannah Kent, bestselling author of Devotion
In the past, we had always spent our summer holidays in remote places. That had always been my mother’s preference. This year was different . . .
Ten-year-old Alex thought this holiday would be fun, but now everyone in her family is being boring. Her mother needs to finish her novel, her dad wants to watch cricket and her older sister only has eyes for the local lifeguard.
Then her new friend, Kahu, tells her a secret. Two years ago, a girl went missing and everyone said she drowned. But what if the adults are wrong? What if she’s waiting to be found?
As Alex and Kahu hunt for clues, childhood curiosity soon gives way to a darker reality. As the summer heat peaks, one terrifying question remains: did the missing girl really drown, or is a predator hiding in plain sight?
Brilliantly page-turning and tensely atmospheric, A Beautiful Family will leave a lump in your throat and a hole in your heart.
‘Immersive . . . Alix grasps at the truth of things, but her perspective means only the reader parses the more adult story unravelling around her . . . as the underlying narratives coalesce’ – The Guardian
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Alix is 10 and more perceptive than her distracted family give her credit for—perhaps perceptive enough to uncover the truth about a supposed drowning.
The summer is hot and the family are staying in a rental property on the New Zealand coast. Alix, a true child of the 1980s, is left largely to her own devices as her parents read and watch cricket, and her teenage sister flirts with the local lifeguard.
A Beautiful Family is both a genuine page-turner and a languid, nostalgia-tinged passport to half-remembered childhood summers. You can smell the barbecue and the suncream, and feel Alix’s tense of temporary freedom. But there is darkness underpinning it all, starting with the death of another child two years previously. Charlotte supposedly drowned while swimming, but a body was never recovered. Alix’s investigation unearths secrets about her family, their holiday home and more. It makes for atmospheric and gripping results.
Customer Reviews
Enjoyable
Enjoyed the book but was left feeling like I was only half way through a bit.
A mystery that was hard to put down
Very different from anything I have read before. It is always good to find stories written from unusual angles, as this one certainly was: seen through the eyes of a ten year old girl. The atmosphere of the odd family holiday, was at times heart-beatingly sad and scary.