Promotional Information

The unforgettable story of the rise, fall and ultimate redemption of an American family. Selected by Oprah Winfrey Book Club. / An Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection - 'I read this book over a year ago, but this family still haunts me.' Oprah Winfrey / Following in the wake of Joyce Carol Oates's critically acclaimed novel 'Blonde' / To be submitted for Summer Reading promotions / Sure to lead paperback review coverage / 'It is a book that will break your heart, heal it, then break it again every time you think about it." Los Angeles Times / 'Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman.' The Herald, review of Blonde

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates, a recipient of the National Book Award, is one of the most highly respected novelists, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories. 'We Were the Mulvaney's' was first published in 1996. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Her highly acclaimed previous novel, 'Blonde', (2000), was short-listed for the National Book Award.

Reviews

'We Were the Mulvaneys works not simply because of its meticulous details and gestures!. What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something on the other side that we'd swear was life itself.' David Gates, The New York Times Book Review 'A brilliantly detailed and varied picture of family life and a succession of dramatic set pieces!These are people we recognise, and she makes us care deeply about them.' Kirkus Prasie for 'Blonde': 'A torrentially imaginative, compulsively readable tour de force.' Sunday Telegraph 'A mighty -- and a mesmerising -- book.' Elaine Showalter, Literary Review 'If you haven't read Joyce Carol Oates before, start here, and now.' Julie Myerson, Independent

In a tale told primarily from the point of view of the youngest boy, Judd, listeners learn how each of the Mulvaneys struggles with 16-year-old Marianne's date rape and her father's fierce reaction to it Mike Mulvaney bans his daughter from the house, ostensibly because she will not name her rapist. In her 26th novel, Oates once again shows her prowess as mistress of the macabre. The best scenes are not early on when we're introduced to the lovely, successful Mulvaneys, their smart and charming children, and their middle-class American milieu. They are not in the rebuilding of individual lives in the wake of the father's disintegration and death. Nor are they toward the end, when the Mulvaneys reunite as an almost-functional, though much-changed family. It is the flashbacks of Marianne's date rape and especially brother Patrick's plotting and executing his vigilante justice that carry listeners from sentence to sentence throughout Adams's utterly convincing reading. Based on the Penguin hardcover. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.