Product Description

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet ..."The Lovely Bones" is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. '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". '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".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.

As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue".

The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow".

Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com

Review
'My name was Salmon, like the fish, first name, Susie I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer.'

Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
'Painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief'

Customer Reviews

Absolutely amazing & beautifully bewitching!
Following the murder of Susie Salmon, we watch her family cope with their grief and loss. However this is no ordinary crime novel, we follow Susie's family over the years through her eyes as she views them from her heaven. The novel draws you into the characters' world and you feel yourself become part of the family so feeling their loss and frustration as the murderer evades capture. I found this book to be very atmospheric and emotional. I think this book haunts you for a long time and although very different it's atmosphere reminded me of the classic Harper Lee novel "To kill a Mockingbird".

What a lovely book The Lovely Bones is...
This is a beautiful novel. Once in a while a really special first novel emerges and this is one such novel.

From the first page when the narrator reveals herself to be dead; brutally raped and murdered as a school girl, the reader knows that this is something quite different and compelling. This is a book that is virtually impossible to put down and it stays with you when you're not reading it. You will search out time to read it.

Alice Sebold's novel works on may levels. At the simplest level there is a thriller within the novel in the shape of 'Will the murderer be caught?'

At the heart of the book is the tale of a family living their lives after the murder of their daughter/ sister and how this changes everyone's story. This is where Sebold excells. The descriptions of the love and friendship between a father and child are beautifully well observed and painfully moving. As is the account of what it means for a parent to lose this.

The Lovely Bones is also a tribute to women and children who have experienced violence.

Sebold covers so much ground here and even manages to tell the story of Susie Salmon's murderer.

You may think that this is a heavy book, but nothing could be further from the truth. The prose is deft and clipt. At the same time the description of Susie's heaven is beautifully poetic.

This is a book full of light and hope. Susie Salmon will emerge as one of modern literatures favourite characters and her story will stay with you long after the last page is read.

Read Lucky and you will learn how and why Alice Sebold created such a wonderful generous world from a tragic beginning.

Read and enjoy.

A lovely book
In a nutshell, I liked this book very much. I was convinced that I'd find it cloying and sentimental but I was surprised to find that it was far from this. There's no doubt that it was sad but like William Trevor's very excellent The Story of Lucy Gault, this sadness wasn't soppy but made more real because it was tinged with regret, unfulfilled promise and heartbreak regarding what might have been. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire reading experience and found myself getting lost in the story, particularly the first few chapters which gripped me to the point that I completely lost track of time.

In The Lovely Bones, Sebold has created a wonderful set of characters, especially the narrator, Susie Salmon, who tells the story of her family's life from beyond the grave. Murdered when she was 14 by a neighbour, Susie watches as her parents and siblings try to cope with her terrible death, each one reacting and dealing with their loss in very different ways. From her vantage point in heaven Susie sees everything but this never lessens her love for her family or her strong desire to return to Earth.

It sounds completely airy, fairy but Sebold's writing is so deft and confident it never resorts to cliché or fairytale extremes; it is totally believable from start to finish and you can't help thinking that if there is life after death then this is exactly what it will be like.

In much the same way that Anne Tyler takes the ordinary and makes it into something extraordinary, The Lovely Bones is about normal people finding themselves in an abnormal situation and coping with it the best way that they can. This is a mesmerizing book that resonates long after you read the final page. Read it if you can.