The Falls

Description

A tale of murder, loss and romance in the mist of Niagara Falls: it is the crowning achievement of Joyce Carol Oates's career to date. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls. He's a newly-wed, and his bride has been left behind in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. For two weeks, Alma, the deserted bride, waits by the side of the roaring waterfall for news of her husband's recovered body. During her vigil, an unlikely new love story begins to unfold when she meets a wealthy lawyer who is transfixed by her strange, otherworldly gaze. So it all begins, in the 1950s, with the dark foreboding of the Falls as the sinister background to the tragedy. From this cataclysmic event unfurls a drama of parents and their children; of secrets and sins; of lawsuits, murder and, eventually redemption. As Alma's children learn that their past is enmeshed with a hushed-up scandal involving radioactive waste materials, they must confront not only their personal history but America's murky past: the despoiling of the American landscape and the corruption and greed of the massive industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s. This novel of tremendous sweep and pace is about the American family in crisis - but also about America itself in the mid-20th century. This book alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the Great American Novelists.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

'Eminently readable and though full of heart is utterly heartbreaking.' Vogue 'Oates offers a shrewd, often chilling analysis of an unhappy marriage...[she] deftly widens her focus to...Niagara, corrupt and dangerously polluted.' Sunday Times 'If you only read one new novel this autumn, make it this... you'll be hooked within pages' Mail on Sunday '...engaging...compelling...a flair for the minutiae of character...' Guardian 'The Falls is a swirling cataract of invention, and a mesmerising read.' Daily Telegraph