Missing Mom: A Novel - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006081621X ISBN 13: 9780060816216

Publisher: Ecco, 2005

Synopsis

last time

Last time you see someone and you don't
know it will be the last time. And all that
you know now, if only you'd known then.
But you didn't know, and now it's too late.
And you tell yourself How could I have
known, I could not have known.

You tell yourself.

This is my story of missing my mother. One
day, in a way unique to you, it will be your
story, too.

From Joyce Carol Oates comes this candid, intimate, engaging, and personal new novel.

Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even—from an unexpected source—a nurturing love.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

From AudioFile

Nikki, an upstate New York feature writer, tells the story of life as the daughter of Gwen, recently widowed and given to a homey gentility. Gwen is subsequently murdered, but the book is less a murder mystery than a self-absorbed narrative, by a not particularly likable main character. Listeners might expect that a novel read by the wonderful Anna Fields and written by the incomparable Oates would knock their socks off. The novel starts out with Oates's usual expertise, but then things become tedious and disappointing. Anna Fields provides a valiant, emotional reading, but not even she can present an unbearably long list of the word WHY without its becoming tiresome. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 006081621X
• ISBN 13: 9780060816216
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448