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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.
This information about Missing Mom 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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