'Under the Skin' by Michel Faber

This is a strange and beautiful book. Isserley spends most of her time driving her little red car through the Scottish highlands, picking up beefy lone male hitchhikers. Why she does so and what happens to the hitchhikers is slowly made apparent, as is Isserley’s true nature as an extreme outsider who is subtly yet profoundly altered by contact with the world in which she is planted. Faber’s breath-taking prose and narrative restraint make Isserley’s pain at posing as what she is not, her emotional transformation through her imposture, the new empathy she unexpectedly discovers, and the uncertainty and vulnerability she feels as she is caught between what she can never return to being and what she can never be, into something believable, thought-provoking and moving. Our received attitudes towards ‘the other’ (however conceived) are constantly called into question and left inverted. Faber makes what should be familiar strange, and what should be horrific suffused with profound and beautiful melancholy.
>> I read this book after seeing the strange and beautiful film based on it.