The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by the American writer Alice Sebold and her first novel. It is narrated by Susie Salmon, a teenage girl who is murdered and then observes the world she has left from a personal heaven, which gives the book a narrator who knows more than the people still living and less than the reader expects.

The story moves between three things: Susie's account of what happened to her, the investigation by a detective who suspects the wrong man, and the slow reconstruction of a family after a loss that nothing in their ordinary life prepared them for. Her father keeps looking for evidence, her mother leaves, and her sister grows up in the shadow of a death that is discussed everywhere except at home.

Sebold writes in a plain, steady voice and refuses the revenge the premise seems to promise, keeping Susie's heaven a place of ordinary rooms and remembered places. The novel became an immediate bestseller, and a film adaptation was directed by Peter Jackson, who had bought the rights himself.