Alice Sebold is the author of the bestselling novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and the memoir Lucky. She lives in California.

A hard-hitting and redemptive memoir from Alice Sebold, bestselling author of The Lovely Bones.

A hard-hitting and redemptive memoir from Alice Sebold, bestselling author of The Lovely Bones.

In a memoir hailed for its searing candour and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus.
What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit - as she struggles for understanding ('After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes'); as her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction.

In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: 'You save yourself or you remain unsaved.'

'A rueful, razor-sharp memoir . . . Sebold tells what it's like to go through a particular kind of nightmare in order to tell what it's like - slowly, bumpily, triumphantly - to heal' Sarah Kerr, Vogue