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Published Feb 2017
752 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.
A powerfully resonant and provocative novel from American master and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.
In this striking, enormously affecting novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God's will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town while Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.
In her moving, insightful portrait, Joyce Carol Oates fully inhabits the perspectives of two interwoven families whose destinies are defined by their warring convictions and squarely - but with great empathy - confronts an intractable, abiding rift in American society.
"Starred Review. In this robust, relentless, inquisitive, and astutely balanced novel of social conflict, Oates portrays with unfailing nuance two troubled men on the opposite sides of the ever-fraught abortion-rights debate." - Booklist
"Starred Review. Best-selling, award-winning author Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys) hardly needs introduction, and her satisfying, multilayered offering will surely be in demand. Book groups would do well to add this to their springtime fare for lively discussion material. In the light of recent American political events, questions put forward by Oates's latest should be addressed, even if clear answers may be hard to find." - Library Journal
"Oates masterfully renders tension and despair but not the complexity of her subject." - Kirkus
"[Some] of the emotional nuance is thinly developed... Nevertheless, Oates's sprawling tale presents a sensitively painted portrait of the inextricable quality of grief and the weight of family legacy, showing how unexpected connections can bind people together in counterintuitive ways." - Publishers Weekly
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Photo by Dustin Cohen
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times 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; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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