The Restraint Of Beasts

After the twin evils of sloth and alcohol lead to a horribly botched job, three fence builders flee South in Magnus Mills’ surreal black comedy.

Tam and Richie’s long-suffering foreman narrates Magnus Mills’ debut novel, which begins with a hapless trio of fence builders being exiled from Scotland to England after a particularly unsuccessful job. The result is a black comedy in which all hell constantly breaks loose, despite the narrator’s endless attempts to mitigate disaster.

"(A) witty, intricate fable about a working-class hell constructed by its own inhabitants. Mills, himself a former fence builder and bus driver, writes merciless deadpan dialogue."   -  Anthony Bourdain, The New York Times Book Review

"As dull as this sounds, the pleasure achieved by Mills' text comes when a reader self-consciously realizes he's become riveted to a shaggy-dog story about fence-building and death, a story that will not make a lick of sense until the last sentence in the book."   -  David Bowman, San Francisco Chronicle

Magnus Mills is the author of The Field of the Cloth of Gold and eight other novels, including The Restraint of Beasts -  which won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now the Costa) First Novel Award in 1999. His novel The Field of the Cloth of Gold was published to great critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015.