Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Lovely Bones | 2002 |
| The Almost Moon | 2007 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Lucky | 1999 |
About Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold (born 6 September 1963 in Madison, Wisconsin) is an American author known for the novels “The Lovely Bones” and “The Almost Moon” and for the memoir “Lucky”. “The Lovely Bones” stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than a year and was filmed by Peter Jackson in 2009.
Sebold grew up in the Paoli suburb of Philadelphia, where her father taught Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated from Great Valley High School in 1980. She took her bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University in 1984, briefly attended graduate school at the University of Houston, then spent ten years in Manhattan, working as a waitress while trying to write. She later moved to Southern California, where she was caretaker of an artists’ colony, and earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1998.
“Lucky” (1999) describes her rape as a Syracuse freshman in May 1981 and the years that followed. Anthony Broadwater, the man convicted of the attack, served 16 years in prison and was exonerated in November 2021 when a judge overturned the conviction. Sebold made a public apology a week later, and Scribner announced that it would stop distributing the book in all formats while author and publisher considered how to revise it. A planned film of the memoir was cancelled.
She had begun “The Lovely Bones” in 1996 or 1997 under the working title “Monsters”, but set it aside to write the memoir first. Published in 2002, the novel tells the story of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered at 14. By 2007 it had sold more than ten million copies worldwide. It won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel and the Heartland Prize in 2002, and the American Booksellers Association’s Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003. The film starred Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon.
Her second novel, “The Almost Moon” (2007), follows an art class model who kills her mother, and uses the act to examine relationships between parents and daughters. It received mixed reviews and remains her most recent book. Sebold also guest-edited “The Best American Short Stories 2009”.
Photo: David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).