From the author of the bestselling Girls in Trucks, a sad, wry testament to the beauty and recklessness of youth

The city of Grifonia, Italy, is swarming with secrets—thousands of years of dark, murderous secrets.
     Taz, a British student who has just arrived for her year abroad, thinks that she will spend her time in Italy sipping wine and taking in the rolling Umbrian hills. But she soon falls in with a cabal of posh, reckless girls—the B4—who turn her quaint fantasies into an erotic and dangerous rush through the darkest realms of friendship and love. Abroad is a chilling parable of modern girlhood from an author who “from her opening line . . . grabs you and never lets go” .
     Not since Donna Tartt’s The Secret History have we been treated to such an addictive tale of tumultuous adolescence. We see Taz scared and alone, but hungry for new experience and piqued by the thrill of living abroad. We see her roommate, the plainspoken American Claire, who worries about Taz’s motives and expresses sincere concern for her safety—but everything changes when they fall for the same man.
     And then there’s what we don’t see—the perils that lurk around the corner. We don’t see the secrets that friends—and lovers—keep from one another. And we don’t see the force that is bigger than Taz, bigger than her friends and loves, a force that seems to be propelling them all toward a dark, awful end. Inspired by real events but tackled with grace and sharpness by a master storyteller, this is Katie Crouch at her finest.

Reader Reviews

Tegan

(4/5)

Jan 18, 2025

Review also published at The Founding Fields!Abroad by Katie Crouch instantly intrigued me. The premise of this novel is similar to that of the real life murder mystery involving Amanda Knox, accused of killing her roommate while studying abroad in Italy. In this novel the story is not told from the murderer’s perspective, but the victim’s. Abroad takes place in Grifonia, Italy; a city known as the party town for the students studying at the college. Grifonia is a true Italian city, with brick

Michelle

(5/5)

I received by copy of Abroad through the Goodreads First Read program.An absolutely phenominal book, Abroad had my head spinning for all that I did not see coming, despite the "writing on the wall". For much of the book I felt like Tabitha must have, seduced by the extravagance, the parties, the culture, the people, too innocent to put it all together.Leaving her small Irish town, Tabitha Deacon sets out for a year abroad to study at a university in Grifonia, Italy. Determined to make the most o...

Joan Gelfand

Full disclosure - Katie Crouch was in my writing workshop with Tom Parker several years back - she was one of the best writers in the class. This is the first book I've read, but I'll go back now and read "Girls in Trucks."This book dangerously borders on chick lit for twenty somethings but to her credit, Crouch adds gravitas by adding the theme of mercy killings. No more said - no spoilers - but the historical addition added an important and very literary sub plot. Her characters are for the mo...

Roxanne

You know, the weird thing about this book is that all the characters were awful - I didn't like a single one of them, including Taz - and yet I was completely enthralled by the story! I just HAD to find out what happened!!! Mind you, I didn't realize until the end that this book was based on a true story, so I don't know how that affects my rating. Maybe I would have felt differently if I knew anything about the true crime version, but whatever - I personally thought it was an absorbing read!One...

Daisy Treloar

(3/5)

The trajectory this novel was taking (well, the one I thought it was taking) felt dark and delicious and drew me to believe that it was going somewhere secretly thrilling. In the end, that promise was a hollow one – the actual murder reveal was disappointing to say the least. What's more, the 'beyond the grave' narration got a little hammy and many characters suffered from underdevelopment (in a bizarre but timely turn of events it's the men who lack dimensionality here).But it's the disparate n...

Margaryta

Abroad Thank you to Knopf Canada/Random House Canada for providing me with an advanced reader’s copy of this book to review. I will say with rather fair certainty this book will end up being one of the most – if not THE MOST – memorable books of this whole year. I didn’t know what to expect from it exactly, not even after reading the summary and already being extremely curios about what’s inside. I was even scared of being disappointed. That, gladly, didn’t happen; it was much the opposite. ...

Robert Jones

Great novels don't draw attention to the artifice of character, setting and plot. Instead, they just are. This seamless quality is how we can fall down the rabbit hole, giving up our identity to inhabit another. The success of the storytelling in Katie Crouch's latest is even more impressive given it is built off of incendiary and dynamic current events.

Lara

(1/5)

Reads like a high school girl's prose. Why was this published?!

A little creepy, but completely engrossing.I am unbalanced -- but I am not made with snow.I am mad the way young girls are mad,With an offering, an offering. . . - Anne Sexton"The Etruscans... a savage people... life cheap and extinguishable... yet unheard-of-sophistication... mysterious, complete disappearance... an aqueduct we could use even today..."Iphigenia. Stabbed as a sacrifice to Artemis.Agamemnon killed a deer in Artemis' sacred forest, so she stole his wind when he sailed to Troy. A p...

Elizabeth La Lettrice

I actually loved this book. It takes a lot to get me completely enthralled in a book these days but this one did it. I did forgo dinner to read all evening and finish.Crouch mastered the slow reveal and the interspersed historical accounts within the story helped to keep my mind guessing at where the story was going. I did study abroad in Italy at the same time as the Amanda Knox events occurred and then went back to school there during the peak of the trial period and attended seminars and talk...

Becky

For Taz (Tabitha), a college student from Ireland, her year abroad in Italy starts innocently enough. As part of the Enteria program she'd chosen Grifonia for her year of foreign study. Her Italian is passable - not great, but enough to get by - and the city seemed a bit of a better choice than either Rome or Florence. Safer. Unfortunately for Taz her time in Grifonia will end in tragedy as her year abroad evolves into something quite different from the learning adventure she'd expected. I'm fin...

Sera

I really enjoyed this book on audio, even though the reader struggled at times with the multiple accents that she needed to pull off the read. The American one was terrible, unless that's how people outside of the US view that that is the way in which Americans speak and act. Who knows? There is also quite a bit of heavy foreshadowing that seemed to be overdone and unnecessary.In spite of these flaws, I thought that this was a great book. Crouch did an excellent job of developing her characters,...

Karen

Darkly mesmerizing, seductive, and based on the Amanda Knox case, Abroad is a trifecta of eerie perfection. Gone to Italy to spend a semester studying language, Tabitha "Taz" finds the friends she thinks she has always wanted. Popular, poised, and moneyed, the group of three take Taz into their fold, using her as their interpreter and using her, one suspects, for something more, something unclear at first to our naive narrator. Despite her new friends, their endless parties, the whirlwind of exp...

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Abroad

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Reader Reviews