The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Summary
Susie Salmon, fourteen years old, is murdered by her neighbor George Harvey on December 6, 1973, lured into an underground den he built in a cornfield near her Pennsylvania home. She narrates the entire novel from her own personal heaven, watching her family fracture under the weight of a case that never gets a body or a conviction: her father Jack grows obsessed with proving Harvey did it, her mother Abigail has an affair and eventually leaves the family for years, and her younger sister Lindsey grows up carrying suspicions the adults around her cannot act on. Susie watches her own killer move on to more victims elsewhere, evading capture, and the novel resists giving her the courtroom resolution a crime story usually promises. Late in the book Susie briefly possesses the body of her school friend Ruth to experience physical intimacy with a boy she loved while alive, a scene that divided early readers between finding it moving and finding it a strange indulgence. Harvey is never caught by the family; he dies years later, off page and by accident, struck by a falling icicle while stalking a new victim in New Hampshire, and the case Susie's family spent a decade unable to close simply ends without them ever knowing.
Sebold writes the grief with procedural patience, tracking the investigation and the slow repair of the marriage in equal measure rather than lingering on the crime itself, which she handles quickly and without spectacle in the opening pages. It reads easily and moves fast for a novel about this much loss, and the premise, a murdered child narrating her own aftermath, risks a sentimentality that the book mostly, though not always, manages to avoid.
Historical Context & Significance
The Lovely Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel in 2002, a genre prize from the Horror Writers Association rather than a general literary one, and it has never won a major fiction prize such as the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. Reviews split sharply: Katherine Bouton in the New York Times Book Review praised Sebold's control as a first time novelist, while Philip Hensher in The Observer called the book saccharine and unfeeling despite finding it very readable.
None of that division slowed its sales. The novel had 925,000 copies in print after eleven printings within weeks of its summer 2002 publication, outpacing any other first novel Publishers Weekly could recall, and it reached number one in hardcover fiction at both Borders and Barnes and Noble, an unusually large commercial life for a literary debut. Peter Jackson's 2009 film adaptation, starring Saoirse Ronan as Susie, earned Stanley Tucci an Academy Award nomination for playing Harvey, and a 2018 stage adaptation by Bryony Lavery brought the novel to British theatres.