Susie pops down to the family duplex at frequent intervals and is glimpsed, fleetingly, in the corners of rooms. Less convincing, perhaps, are the forays between heaven and earth. Sebold's portrayal of a family reeling under the weight of unimaginable loss is extremely moving. 'Then, as consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in.' 'Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be,' she says of her father. This fosters an agonising false hope in her parents, which is gradually replaced by the raw grief reserved only for relatives of the murdered or disappeared. Her elbow is found near a large patch of blood, but there is no other trace of a body. Speaking from heaven, a heaven with many of the more comforting accoutrements of an American high school - room-mates, counsellors and swings, but glossy magazines instead of textbooks and no teachers - Susie tells the tale of her vicious abduction and murder in the cornfield near her home and observes the sequence of events that follow. At the trial, months later, the white pants she had worn on the night, now wrapped in plastic and passed around as evidence, were almost entirely red.Īs the opening lines reveal, the novel is told in the voice of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered. She didn't know how to follow the rapist's instructions: where to put her legs or how to 'suck dick'. ' 'You're the worst bitch I ever done this to,' ' he told her.

Her assailant thrust his penis into her mouth and urinated on her face, before raping her again and grabbing the loose change from her pockets. She was beaten, cut and dragged into a tunnel, where she was sodomised and raped. When she was 18, the woman sitting in front of me, a woman with translucent skin, pink lipstick and extraordinary quadrangular, diamanté-trimmed glasses, was stopped on her way home from a college party. Another American creative writing graduate takes the well-travelled, hard-boiled route to literary success.īut Lucky is not a novel. 'I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.' Her other book, Lucky, also goes straight for the jugular: 'In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.' These are textbook fiction openings, their unadorned prose designed to maximise the visceral punch. 'My name was Salmon, like the fish first name, Susie', begins her first novel, The Lovely Bones. Alice Sebold knows all about arresting first lines.

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