This is Susie Salmon, speaking from heaven - which looks a lot like her school playground - where everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it - except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on Earth. Watching from here, Susie sees her happy suburban family devastated by her death, isolated, even from one another, as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet . . .

Praise for "The Lovely Bones"

'Moving and compelling . . . I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed'

Maggie O'Farrell, "Sunday Telegraph"

'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose . . . "The Lovely Bones" is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing'

"The Times"

'A work of extraordinary structural originality, finding a fresh way to combine great tenderness of feeling with the most brutal events. You can sense its poise from the very first sentences'

"Evening Standard"

'That rare thing, a debut novel that takes the stuff of terrible tragedy and manages to transform it into something hopeful and redemptive . . . Alice Sebold's words are strung together like the most delicate of charm bracelets. This book will stay with you long after you finish the last page'

"Daily Mail"

'In "The Lovely Bones," [Alice Sebold] deals with almost unthinkable subjects with humour and intelligence and a kind of mysterious grace'

"New York Times Book Review"

'A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence'

"New York Times"