Here is the captivating tale of three men who work for a company specializing in high-tension fences, the kind that keep beasts in and humans out--or maybe the other way around. Tam and Richie are good Scots lads at heart (taciturn and suspicious of authority) who have turned loafing and pub-crawling into an art form. They try the patience of their foreman, the narrator of the novel, who has the misfortune of being British. His thankless task is keeping Tam and Richie from going too far astray, and maintaining some semblance of order in their fence-building labors.

Carefully laid plans go haywire from the start. The fence they built for Mr. McCrindle has gone slack, and while he watches them attempt to set things right, things go horribly, terribly wrong. Covering their tracks as best they can, the hapless trio head south from Scotland to do a job in England. But sometimes good fences make disastrous neighbors.

Magnus Mills gives us a wiry novel of tensile strength that proves him a writer of ferocious talent. Eerie, resonant, spare yet rich in tones both hilarious and ominous--as if a work by Irvine Welsh, or perhaps Macbeth,had been adapted by the Coen brothers--his story has an ending so ingenious, insidious, and satisfying, that it remains locked in the mind long after the last spellbinding sentence has been strung into place. The Restraint of Beastsseems destined to become a classic.