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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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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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