The Lovely Bones

Description

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In heaven, Susie Salmon can have whatever she wishes for - except what she most wants, which is to be back with the people she loved on earth. In the wake of her murder, Susie watches as her happy suburban family is torn apart by grief; as her friends grow up, fall in love, and do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But as Susie will come to realize, even in death, life is not quite out of reach . . . A luminous, astonishing novel about life and death, memory and forgetting, and finding light in the darkest places, The Lovely Bones became an instant classic when it was first published in 2002. There are now over ten million copies in print.

Alice Sebold is the author of the bestselling novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and the memoir Lucky. She lives in California with her husband, the writer Glen David Gold.

Moving and compelling . . . It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you. I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed -- Maggie O'Farrell * Sunday Telegraph * Spare, beautiful and brutal prose . . . The Lovely Bones is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing * The Times * Takes the stuff of terrible tragedy and transforms it into something hopeful and redemptive * Daily Mail * [Sebold] has created a novel that is painfully fine and accomplished, one which readers will have their own difficulties relinquishing, long after the last page is turned * Los Angeles Times * A chilling juxtaposition of innocence against evil * New Statesman * Sebold has given us a fantasy-fable of great authority, charm, and daring. She's a one-of-a-kind writer -- Jonathan Franzen