Alice Sebold Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Alice Sebold is an American author of fiction. She is most likely best known by the average person for the wild success of her bestselling book The Lovely Bones, which came out in 2002. This bestseller immediately sold copies and it took off after that like wildfire. It was even was adapted into a major motion picture that did well in theaters. A special edition of the book came out in 2009 titled Looking Glass. The Lovely Bones was also the 2003 winner of the Bram Stoker Best First Novel.

The Lovely Bones came out in theaters in 2009. It starred a young Saoirse Ronan as the main character, dead girl Susie Salmon. Her parents were played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz. Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci played her grandparents. It was directed by Peter Jackson, and the screenplay was written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, with original story credit going to Alice Sebold. The score for the film was composed by Bryan Eno.

Alice Sebold hasn’t just written fictional novels. She had a nonfiction book published in 1999 titled Lucky. She also contributed to Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories 2009 compilation.

The Lovely Bones is Alice Sebold’s first book in the fiction genre. The main character in this book is Susie Salmon, and she narrates throughout the novel. She tells the reader how she was only fourteen years old when she was brutally murdered on December 6, 1973. She says that the killer was someone close to home– someone from their neighborhood.

Worse, her family knew him. Her father had spoken to him once and held a conversation, and her mother liked the flowers he had planted on the border of his yard. Susie is in heaven now, but she still looks down on the real world. Her version of heaven is like a school playground. She even has friends to share a room with and counselors up there that are there to help the newcomers adjust. Even though she came to an untimely end, heaven is pretty nice and everything she could ever want shows up when she thinks about it. That is, except for her wish to be alive once more with the people that she cared about while on Earth.

Susie watches steadily from her place up in heaven, but not everything that she sees is comforting. She has witnessed her family that was so happy in their lives in the suburbs together slowly implode on themselves once she died. Each member of her family has to come to their own terms with her passing. But she also sees them slowly accept it, and one by one they all grow up over the years and move on with their lives, doing normal things like falling in love and graduating from school–things that she never actually got the chance to do when she was alive.

But even though her life is over, Susie doesn’t have to give up quite yet. And she may be more connected to her former life than she even realizes. As she tries to get through to the people that she loves, she realizes that she wants more than anything to be alive. But if she can’t have that, maybe she can have the other thing that she wants: to have her body and bones found at last by her family.

This exciting novel marks Sebold’s powerful entry into the world of fiction, and what a debut it is. Well-received by critics and readers, you may have heard about this popular bestseller before. A novel about life, death, vengeance, forgiving, and memory, this novel is exciting and gripping and sad all at once.

The Almost Moon is Alice Sebold’s first book. It was published in 2007. This unforgettable novel focuses on the main character Helen Knightly, a woman who finds herself crossing over the line all the way to something that she thought would be unthinkable. Helen is a woman that has given the hours of her life to others for years and years.

Helen has taken care of others all her life and never really lived for herself. She has given her time to her mother, haunted by ghosts of the past. She gives her time to a mysterious father who never really quite seems present. She gives her time to her husband and her children when they are little and when they are grown. But an ordinary life gives way to something totally different when she crosses a line that cannot be uncrossed.

Crossing over that boundary causes things to change in a very real way. From that point forward, her life rushes at her and the craziness of it is something more than she could ever have thought would have happened. It all happens so quickly that there is almost no time to process it at all. It takes just twenty-four hours for Helen’s entire world to flip over and transform into something else.

This novel covers that entire space of time and the pacing covers just a short period in Helen’s life. A quick novel that explores the ties that bind so many relationships, from being a spouse to being a lover to being a daughter and a mother, it also explores the ideas of devotion and what price dedication can exact when you give yourself up for another. That fine line between love and hate is always changing and the price that you pay when you are devoted to the ones you love can only be matched by the high price you pay when you finally throw caution to the wind.

This exciting story takes the attention of the reader from the start and doesn’t let go. Fluid, interesting, confusing, gripping, and suspenseful, Alice Sebold has written another hit big enough to follow the soaring success of The Lovely Bones. Will Hollywood come calling? It might only be a matter of time. Read this book before it becomes a movie and get in on the seductive new tale from Sebold with The Almost Moon.