The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold [FIRST BOOK CLUB PRINTING] 2002 • Little Brown

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 

FIRST BOOK CLUB EDITION • FIRST PRINTING [2002] LITTLE BROWN & COMPANY

Though book has stated First Edition with full number line on copyright page, this is the earliest book club edition; featuring solid black paper boards and no price on dust jacket.

Dust jacket is in very good shape; light shelf wear to edges and a small blemish to lower rear.   Now housed in a new HQ brodart jacket protector.

Book itself is excellent.  Two tiny blemishes to frontal boards.  Reads good as new.  

The Lovely Bones is the story of a family devastated by a gruesome murder -- a murder recounted by the teenage victim. Upsetting, you say? Remarkably, first-time novelist Alice Sebold takes this difficult material and delivers a compelling and accomplished exploration of a fractured family's need for peace and closure.

The details of the crime are laid out in the first few pages: from her vantage point in heaven, Susie Salmon describes how she was confronted by the murderer one December afternoon on her way home from school. Lured into an underground hiding place, she was raped and killed. But what the reader knows, her family does not. Anxiously, we keep vigil with Susie, aching for her grieving family, desperate for the killer to be found and punished.

Sebold creates a heaven that's calm and comforting, a place whose residents can have whatever they enjoyed when they were alive -- and then some. But Susie isn't ready to release her hold on life just yet, and she intensely watches her family and friends as they struggle to cope with a reality in which she is no longer a part. To her great credit, Sebold has shaped one of the most loving and sympathetic fathers in contemporary literature.