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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
This information about A Book of American Martyrs was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo by Dustin Cohen
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to "a master of the thriller and noir literary genre."
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