Volume 50, Number 1 · January 16, 2003
Novel of the Year
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Little, Brown, 328 pp., $21.95
On May 22 of this year, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold's debut novel, which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who's been raped and murdered, the novelist and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared on the Today show and declared that if people had one book to read during the summer, 'it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in years.' Viewers did what they were told and seemed to agree. Within days of Quindlen's appearance, Sebold's novel had reached the number-one position on Amazon.com, and her publisher, Little, Brown, decided to increase the size of the first printing from 35,000—already healthily optimistic for a 'literary' first novel by an author whose only other book, a memoir of her rape, was a critical but not commercial success—to 50,000 copies; a week before the book's official publication date, it was in its sixth printing, with nearly a quarter-million copies in print.
Review, 3753 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |