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, speaking to us from heaven. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. There are counsellors to help newcomers to adjust, and friends to room with. Everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it - except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth.

From heaven, Susie watches. She sees her happy suburban family implode after her death, as each member tries to come to terms with the terrible loss. 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. It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #588 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-06
• 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

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
'Sebold has given us a fantasy-fable of great authority, charm, and daring. She's a one-of-a-kind writer'

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

For women only
I was recommended this by female co-workers but didn't take to it and reckon most men will feel the same. The plot would lend itself to being a thriller's but the book could barely be further from being one, despite a couple of Hitchcockian sequences. What we get is schmaltzy family drama which drifts along in a not particularly compelling fashion.
Bland incidents are relayed about the unsympathetic characters while all the time you wait for the real exciting bits to come, or at least some interesting philosophy. And you wait, and wait... but nothing arrives. There's definitely the germ of a great, if deeply unpleasant idea here, but airy sentiment and woolly storytelling muffle it. The conclusion especially is a real non event.
Finally, the heaven idea is simply silly and irritating. It hardly sounds like 'heaven' either, more like utter hell, sitting on a swing watching dull earthlings mope about. It also begs the question: will she be sitting there watching for the next five billion years until the earth is destroyed by the sun going supernova? If so, what will she do then!?
It's difficult to envisage the upcoming film being liked by men either, even though it's Peter Jackson directing.

Almost perfect
This is a very moving book, which dealt with the subject of child murder with great respect - in direct contrast to the misogyny of The Last Four Things by Andrew Taylor. I felt able to believe in Susie Salmon straight away, despite the fact that she was narrating her story from heaven. The depiction of the effect that grief has upon a family was intensely drawn, and Alice Sebold has created some marvellous characters - especially Ruth, who honoured the murdered as she walked the streets of New York City, and Susie's glamorous grandmother, Grandma Lynn.

I felt that the seamlessness of the book was spoilt near the end when the dead girl miraculously consummated her relationship with Ray, her first love, and I also wished for an alternate ending for Mr Harvey, Susie's murderer, but you can't have it all.

Disappointing rubbish
I picked this book up because there was so much hype about it--I thought there must be a reason why everyone is gushing about this, it turns out there wasn't. Yes, I did have an overwhelming indescribable emotional epiphany after reading this--I was wondering if the entire world had gone mad. Why this is a bestseller is beyond me? This book is really dull, boring, and badly written. Unfortunately, Sebold does not have any writing talent, whether she is writing about true events or not. Yes, its sad Sebold had to endure some traumatic events in her life, but this does not give everyone a reason to gush about a book that should not be gushed about. The characters are wooden and I did not have any sympathy for any of them whatsoever.
If you read this book before you die, you will regret it.