Beautiful Ugly Audiobook by Alice Feeney

It was a foggy morning in Portland when I pressed play on Beautiful Ugly, my coffee steaming beside me as the world outside felt perfectly in sync with Alice Feeney’s dark and mist-laden Scottish island. From the very first minutes, I found myself completely absorbed—not just by Feeney’s razor-sharp prose, but also by the spellbinding performances of Richard Armitage and Tuppence Middleton. If you’re like me and crave an audiobook that sweeps you away from your living room straight into the heart of its characters’ turmoil, this is one to savor.

Feeney’s reputation as “the Queen of Twists” is well-earned here. The premise—a husband desperate for answers after his wife vanishes, stumbling upon a woman who looks just like her on a remote island—is so wonderfully unsettling. As Grady Green’s story unspooled, I found myself reflecting on how marriage can be both sanctuary and labyrinth; Feeney captures that duality with chilling precision. She taps into those private fears we rarely voice: do we truly know our loved ones? Can grief warp memory until hope itself feels sinister?

The narration is top-tier—Armitage brings Grady’s exhaustion and confusion vividly to life without ever lapsing into melodrama, while Middleton gives Abby (and perhaps her doppelganger?) an eerie vulnerability layered with menace. Their alternating voices heighten the tension at every turn, aided by immersive sound effects—subtle ocean winds or distant gulls—that made it feel as if I too were stranded alongside Grady on that brooding isle.

I’ve long admired audiobooks that push beyond simple storytelling to create atmosphere through audio design; here, each ambient sound deepens immersion rather than distracting from it. More than once I caught myself glancing out my window half-expecting to see mist rolling in from a moor.

What struck me most about Beautiful Ugly was how deftly Feeney manipulates our expectations around change—how wives are presumed to shift while husbands stay constant (or vice versa), yet reality resists such tidy rules. Having lived through relationships where roles slowly reversed or secrets came creeping back years later, I recognized some uncomfortable truths woven through these pages: sometimes love turns ugly before we realize it ever changed at all.

If there was anything I wished for more of, it might be deeper emotional texture for side characters—I occasionally wanted them fleshed out further—but honestly? This hardly dented my engagement with Grady’s spiraling quest for answers or dulled any of those signature Feeney twists (several had me pausing playback just to process what had happened!).

In sum: Beautiful Ugly delivered everything I want in a psychological thriller—taut suspense, flawed characters you ache for even as you doubt their every word, and reveals sharp enough to draw breathless gasps during early morning listens. With atmospheric narration and writing that lingers like sea fog long after finishing the final chapter, this audiobook is absolutely worth losing yourself within.