The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold’s first novel is the great Oprah’s Book Club selection that never was—an accessible, generous, finely observed essay on the question of what the dead want from the living. A 14-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, is raped and murdered at the outset; then commences many years of wandering, grieving, and yearning on both sides of the great divide. It was daring of Sebold to risk the potentially disastrous device of telling the story in the dead girl’s voice, from beyond, but it pays off. By dwelling ostensibly on the dead’s sense of responsibility toward the living, Sebold captures in moving fashion exactly what it is the living owe to the dead: to bear their grief—wait it out, really—and go on living while they can. The book was no doubt written before 9/11, but the vagaries of the publishing cycle have conspired to make it, for the moment anyway, the most potently evocative writing on the subject that we’ve seen.