The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold, 2002
Mystery, thriller & crime Young adultHorrorContemporary fiction
A fourteen-year-old narrates from the afterlife as her family, and the world, keep living around her absence. A soft, lyrical voice carries you through grief and family memory, though the pace slows in places.
Feels like grief, tenderness and dread. About death, family and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to quiet, character-led stories about loss and how a family keeps going. Be aware that the book stays close to violence and grief, which can make it heavy going.
Why read it
It offers a tender, unusual view of what remains after someone dies: the ordinary days, the small objects, the people who keep living.
A page from the book
What a child sees in a snow globe, and what her father answers.
Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world. Alice Sebold.Published in 2002, Sebold's novel became a bestseller and was adapted into a 2009 film directed by Peter Jackson.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is The Lovely Bones for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to quiet, character-led stories about loss and how a family keeps going. Be aware that the book stays close to violence and grief, which can make it heavy going.
- What is The Lovely Bones like?
- A soft, lyrical voice carries you through grief and family memory, though the pace slows in places. Feels like grief, tenderness and dread. About death, family and memory.
- What should I read after The Lovely Bones?
- If you liked The Lovely Bones, try The Road (Cormac McCarthy), One Italian Summer (Rebecca Serle) and Bag of Bones (Stephen King).
A taste of the feed
The relief of letting someone else carry your sadness, just for a moment.
But he holds me so tightly that for a moment, the emotions are at bay. The sadness and fear, the regret and the loathing. He bottles them up inside his arms so that for a split second I don’t have to be the one carrying the weight of them. For this moment, the burden is his.
The Good Girl · Mary Kubica
What a house becomes when no one has been living in it.
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway.
The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed