Dolores Claiborne

Dolores Claiborne is a novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 1992. It was the best-selling novel of that year in the United States, and it introduced Little Tall Island, which King used again later.

The book is written as a statement rather than as a narrative, because Dolores insists on setting out her account in her own words and at her own pace. What she describes is a life lived on an island where everybody knows everyone else and where the local economy is small enough that employment is a form of dependence.

Her employer, Vera Donovan, is a rich woman whose health and mind have been failing for years, and the relationship between the two of them runs through the whole of the statement. So does the death of Dolores's husband, Joe, which happened decades earlier and which the constable has never been satisfied about. What makes the novel distinctive is the voice: the whole thing is spoken by a woman who is entirely aware of how she sounds to the people listening, and who has decided not to care.