Description

A masterful novel about a violent crime and its reverberations throughout a community – as timely and relevant in 2019 as it was when first published in 2001

‘We were the Mulvaneys, remember us? For a long time you envied us, then you pitied us. For a long time you admired us, then you thought Good! that’s what they deserve.’

The Mulvaneys of High Point Farm are blessed. But then, on Valentine’s Day 1976, something happens to Marianne, the pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, and nothing will ever be the same again …

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Publisher Review

'This family still haunts me' Oprah Winfrey 'We Were the Mulvaneys works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures...What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something on the other side that we'd swear was life itself' The New York Times Book Review 'A brilliantly detailed and varied picture of family life and a succession of dramatic set pieces...These are people we recognise, and she makes us care deeply about them' Kirkus 'Oates's prose contains a deep-felt rawness which hovers hovers betwee hope, despair and love' Guardian 'Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman' Herald, review of Blonde