Little Bird of Heaven Book

A searing exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America, Little Bird of Heaven returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.

When young wife and mother Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the police target two suspects: her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father guilty. By novel's end, the fated lovers are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.

Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is classic Oates—where the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty.

The Washington Post - Michael Lindgren

This is a powerful novel. Oates's feel for the rhythms of hardscrabble life and its sour mix of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, adultery and murder is as keen as ever. In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever's Shady Hill. Her descriptions of the geography of urban decay—the rusted bridges, tangled back alleys and trash-strewn lots—are as vivid as any naturalist's portrayal of more felicitous scenes. Her unsentimental language makes a high-lonesome kind of poetry out of otherwise sordid and unremarkable circumstance.