Related from heaven after a brutal rape, Susie watches her family grieve and disintegrate, watches her friends and indeed watches her killer and the sad detective working on her case.  Over the years we live and cry with them for our wonderful narrator truly makes you feel all their pain and joys.  In the end it is an uplifting book despite its subject matter, and above all it is a truly memorable book.

Synopsis

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

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

'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

About the Author

Alice Sebold is the author of the memoir Lucky. She has been chosen by the Village Voice as a Writer on the Verge and has written for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. She lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold. Photograph © Jerry Bauer   More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation