Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Lovely Bones | 2002 | Alice Sebold | Buy |
| 2 | The Almost Moon | 2007 | Alice Sebold | Buy |
The Lovely Bones opens with a line that has lodged itself in millions of readers’ memories: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.” Fourteen-year-old Susie narrates from her personal heaven, watching her family, friends, and killer in the years following her murder. The novel balances grief, healing, and the strange persistence of love across an impossible divide. It spent over fifty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list after its 2002 publication.
The Almost Moon takes a darker, more compressed approach. The novel opens with Helen Knightly killing her deteriorating, mentally ill mother, then follows the next twenty-four hours as she grapples with what she has done. Where The Lovely Bones looks outward at a community shattered by loss, The Almost Moon is an interior study of resentment, obligation, and the weight of a difficult parent. The two books show different sides of Sebold’s interest in the violence that can exist within families and its long aftermath.