The Good Neighbours
Winner of the 2025 Prix Medicis Etranger
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The Good Neighbours
Narrated by:
Samara MacLaren
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Samara MacLaren
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By:
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Nina Allan
About this listen
Starting work on her new project - photographing murder houses - she returns to the island where she grew up for the first time since she left for Glasgow when she was just eighteen. The Isle of Bute is embedded in her identity, the draughty house that overlooked the bay, the feeling of being nowhere, the memory of her childhood friend Shirley Craigie and the devastating familicide of her family by the father, John Craigie.
Arriving at the Craigie house, Cath finds that it's occupied by Financial Analyst Alice Rahman. Her bid to escape the city lifestyle, the anxiety she felt in that world, led her to leave London and settle on the island. The strangeness of the situation brings them closer, leading them to reinvestigate the Craigie murder. Now, within the walls of the Craigie house, Cath can uncover the nefarious truths and curious nature of John Craigie: his hidden obsession with the work of Richard Dadd and the local myths of the fairy folk.
The Good Neighbours is an enquiry into the unknowability of the past and our attempts to make events fit our need to interpret them; the fallibility of recollection; the power of myths in shaping human narratives. Nina Allan skilfully weaves the imagined and the real to create a magically haunting story of memory, obsession and the liminal spaces that our minds frequent to escape trauma.
(P)2021 Quercus Editions Limited©2021 Nina Allan
Critic Reviews
Her literary sensibility fuses the fantastic and the mundane to great effect
Nina Allan weaves a haunting, intricate tale that masterfully blurs genre lines. You'll want to savour every page
A captivating exploration of community, tragedy and memory. Nina Allan's writing is enthralling. (Irenosen Okojie)
A compulsive and twisting read . . . Nina Allan has created a surging and artistic narrative that lingers like a cold breath down your neck at the turn of the last page. (Fiona Murphy)
a compelling murder mystery filled with superstition, fairy folk and murder houses, set on Nina's beloved Isle of Bute ... spellbinding
Allan keeps multiple plates spinning without ever losing psychological coherence as a portrait of its self-denying protagonist's engrossingly complicated inner life. Satisfying, sophisticated and very finely done.
This book cleverly weaves the imagined and the real to create a haunting story that relives the past.
[A] splendid crime narrative of memory, compulsion and the effects of trauma.
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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.