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Published Oct 2005
448 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Oates returns to upstate New York's Mount Ephraim, the setting of We Were the Mulvaneys. This time, she focuses on the middle class - Nikki Eaton is a 31 year old reporter for the smalltown Beacon and the black sheep of the family. She's having an affair with a married DJ; she barely tolerates her widowed mother Gwen, and her homemaker sister, Clare. Two days after the story opens Gwen is murdered by an ex-con. Missing Mom follows Nikki during the year following her mother's death.
'...yet the novel is so conventional and relentlessly detailed that it can't help showing its characters behaving in ways that resonate.' - PW
'...a profoundly involving and haunting explication of grief, followed, finally, by a renewed embrace of life.' - Booklist.
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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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