The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

2004 Winner

National Book Awards Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year

2017 Winner

Specsavers Platinum Bestseller Award

01 January 2015
9781447275206
336 pages

Synopsis

The internationally bestselling novel that inspired the acclaimed film directed by Peter Jackson.

With an introduction by Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles.

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, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones became an instant classic when it was first published. There are now over ten million copies in print. It inspired the film starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon and Saoirse Ronan.

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
Spare, beautiful and brutal prose . . . The Lovely Bones is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing
Takes the stuff of terrible tragedy and transforms it into something hopeful and redemptive