Susan's Review

 Stella Shortlist 2024

Feast comes after O’Grady’s best-selling debut, The Yellow House, and it’s bound to attract many readers. It’s a page-turning psychological thriller, seen from the perspective of three female characters: teenaged Neve, her mother Shannon and her stepmother Alison. Neve is spending her eighteenth birthday at a grand if shambolic mansion with her charismatic musician father, Patrick, and his once famous actor partner Alison, when the arrival of her mother sets in train a series of veiled accusations and evasions. Beneath the surface trappings of wealth – the sumptuous feast of the birthday celebrations – is the gradual revelation of the ugliness of human predation and unspeakable selfishness. Feast is also a masterly exploration of the ambivalence of sexualised and maternal bodies, and the monstrous attempts to defend the indefensible. A disturbing, enthralling read.

Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick's teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and the stepmother she barely knows.

Publishers Reviews


On the weekend of Neve's eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a special feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve's objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations. What none of them know is that Shannon has arrived with a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate faade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.

Feast is the story of three women connected beyond blood, and what happens when their darkest secrets are hauled into the light.

'Complicated and unsettling, nothing is as it seems. Filled with exquisitely drawn characters and powerful storytelling,Feastis a superb read. You will not want to put this book down.' Mirandi Riwoe, author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain