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The Lovely Bones

Synopsis

‘Hopeful and redemptive’ – Daily Mail

Haunting and heartbreaking, The Lovely Bones is the story of a young girl who, from heaven, watches over her family – and her killer.


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 . . .

An astonishing novel about life and death, memory and forgetting, and finding light in the darkest places.

Alice Sebold's book inspired the Peter Jackson film, starring Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan.

‘Moving and compelling . . . 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, author of The Marriage Portrait

Details

15 December 2014
336 pages
9781447275213
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

“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, The Times
“Takes the stuff of terrible tragedy and transforms it into something hopeful and redemptive”Daily Mail, 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, Los Angeles Times
“A chilling juxtaposition of innocence against evil”New Statesman, New Statesman