Under the Skin (First Edition)

Faber, Michel

ISBN 10: 0151006261 / ISBN 13: 9780151006267

Published by Harcourt, New York, 2000

About this Item

New York, Harcourt, 2000. First edition. First printing (with full letter line including A). Hardbound. Fine in a fine jacket. A clean tight copy. Publisher's price intact on front jacket flap ($23.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. Smoke-free. A novel. 311pp. The first U.S. edition of the author's first book. Made into the critically acclaimed motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson.

Seller Inventory # Fiction-Faber

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Under the Skin (First Edition)
• Publisher: Harcourt, New York
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151006261
• ISBN 13: 9780151006267
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

In a surreal portrait of contemporary society run amok, Isserley spends her life picking up hitchhikers, a diverse array of trailer trash, graduate students, thugs, and philosophers, whose only interest for Isserley is whether they have families and whether they have muscles. A first novel. 25,000 first printing.

Review

Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.

So begins Michel Faber's first novel: a lone female scouts the Scottish Highlands in search of well-proportioned men and the reader is given to expect the unfolding of some latter-day psychosexual drama. But commonplace expectation is no guide for this strange and deeply unsettling book; small details at first, then more major clues, suggest that something deeply bizarre is afoot. What are the reason's for Isserley's extensive surgical scarring, her thick glasses (which are just glass), her excruciating backache? Who are the solitary few who work on the farm where her cottage is located? And why are they all nervous about the arrival of someone called Amlis Vess?

The ensuing narrative is one of such cumulative, compelling strangeness that it almost defies description--the one thing that can be said with certainty is that Under The Skin is unlike anything else you have ever read. The result is a narrative of enormous imaginative and emotional coherence from a writer whose control of his medium is nearly flawless and who applies the rules of psychological realism to a fictional world that is terrifying and unearthly to the point that the reader's identification with Isserley becomes one of absolute sympathy.

Michel Faber's debut deserves to inherit and expand upon the acclaim bestowed upon his short-story collection Some Rain Must Fall. Under the Skin is a reviewer's nightmare and a reader's dream: a book so distinctive, so elegantly written and so original that all one can say is simply to experience it. An extraordinary first book. -- Burhan Tufail