Little Bird of Heaven
A Novel
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Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates is a riveting story of love violently lost and found in late 20th century America. In this novel, Oates returns to the Buffalo, New York, region to brilliantly explore the dangerous intersections of romance and eroticism, guilt and obsession, desire and murder. Little Bird of Heaven, a soaring work by the New York Times bestselling author and a nominee for the 2009 Man Booker Prize—one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards—is as powerful and unforgettable as Joyce Carol Oates’s previous acclaimed novels The Gravedigger’s Daughter and We Were the Mulvaneys.
Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, romantic, and captivating tale, set in the Great Lakes region of upstate New York—the territory of her remarkably successful New York Times bestseller The Gravedigger's Daughter.
Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.
When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.
Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.
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Author Extras
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Critical Praise for
Little Bird of Heaven
“Neither crime, nor punishment, the ultimate coupling in the novel serves as a triumph and a release on a scale and with the intensity we’ve come to expect from one of our country’s premier writers.”
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NPR's All Things Considered
“Well-told and ultimately powerful.”
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The Onion
“Readers are breathlessly along for the ride, never sure if Oates will let [her characters] reach redemption or have them fall prey to the hands of their violent, unforgiving upbringings.”
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New York Post
“Little Bird of Heaven starts with the urgency of thriller, then turns into something more existential as the years (and pages) go by. . . . This is a tragedy on a classical scale. . . . In Sparta, passion and violence are inextricably and traumatically linked. Oates does not glorify this; rather, she traces the roots of the pathology to show how desire can degenerate. Oates has written a feminist novel with empathy for men, especially men without power, with no voice besides violence.”
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New York Times Book Review
“Oates deftly merges the personalities of Zoe, Eddy, Krista and Aaron into what is essentially a mystery. . . . But with Oates, no narrative could be a straight detective story. The interior monologues of Krista and Aaron, in their respective portions of the book, show the novelist at her brooding best. . . . The result is a seamless, satisfying tale of small-town life where, as Krista puts it at one point, the long-smoldering relationships among the residents can often be like ‘tangled roots, beneath the surface of the earth.’”
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“This is a powerful novel. Oates’s feel for the rhythms of hardscrabble life and its sour mix of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, adultery and murder is as keen as ever. In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever’s Shady Hill. Her descriptions of the geography of urban decay -- the rusted bridges, tangled back alleys and trash-strewn lots -- are as vivid as any naturalist’s portrayal of more felicitous scenes. Her unsentimental language makes a high-lonesome kind of poetry out of otherwise sordid and unremarkable circumstance ...novels like ‘Little Bird of Heaven,’ with its mixture of the Gothic and the fatalistic, mark Oates as our closest contemporary analogue to Hawthorne: lyrical, moral, unforgiving.”
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Washington Post
“Little Bird of Heaven is at heart a mystery. . . . Oates has an astute grasp of the child’s point of view, of the way simple things loom as symbols of love or betrayal. . . . Oates conveys the loneliness of children feeling their parents separate from them, and not understanding what it’s about. Little Bird of Heaven is not a happy story. It has an unnerving clarity about the power of sexual desire, and the trouble it can cause. But it cleaves to the mind like a strong memory, and after you’ve read it, you may find yourself dreaming about the imaginary town of Sparta, and wondering what the people are doing now.”
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Chicago Tribune
“’Quintessential Joyce Carol Oates: an expertly crafted, lovingly detailed character-driven novel of loss and longing. She is adept at getting into the skin of her characters and illustrating their motivations and desires, even when they aren’t fully understood by the characters themselves...hopelessness permeates Oates’ fictitious town of Sparta, another character in its own right. It’s impossible to read about the place without feeling its grayness and despair. It’s testament to Oates’ skill that by the time you’re finished with Sparta, you’re glad you visited but even gladder you don’t live there.”
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Associated Press
“An absorbing study of lust, trust, and an unsolved murder, Oates’s gritty new mystery explores the attraction between the son of the victim and daughter of the accused.”
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Good Housekeeping
“Oates’ 57th novel is a doozie....It’s vintage Oates: tragic violence, outsize ambitions, dashed hopes, strained family bonds, manly-men roughing up sassy-yet-submissive women, and, of course, sex-crazed teenagers.”
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Elle
“LITTLE BIRD OF HEAVEN is classic Oates. Its depiction of violence, families falling from grace and social class disparities, as well as its location, recall her 1996 bestseller, WE WERE THE MULVANEYS. Fans of Oates will delight in this offering and newcomers to her work will receive a first-class introduction.”
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BookPage
“Beneath the Sturm und Drang of Oates’s third book of 2009 is the archetypal fairy tale: beauty and the beast....Oates unfolds the central gothic intuition—that beauty and the beast are complements—in a way that Charlotte Brontë would highly approve.”
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Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In this narcotic, unnerving, brilliantly composed tale of the struggle for control over the body’s archaic urges, and the quest for morality in a catastrophically corrupted world, Oates creates magnetic characters of heightened awareness and staggering valor. As these sensitive stalwarts fight soul-strangling poverty, hate, crime, despair, and malignant desire, Oates captures with eviscerating precision the used-up, maligned, yet persistent beauty and spirit of stricken rural America, retaining her title as our great and tireless bard of erotic mayhem, malevolent dereliction, delirious anger, impassioned violence, and ferocious strategies of survival.”
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Booklist
For The Gravedigger’s Daughter: “Unquestionably one of Oates’ finest novels, rendered in taut, vivid language, with an emotional power… Perhaps more than any other major contemporary writer, Oates is aware of the fraught dynamics of identity in ‘self-made’ American lives…She honors her own complex heritage, and that of all Americans, in her extraordinary fiction.”
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Chicago Tribune Books
“In this narcotic, unnerving, brilliantly composed tale of the struggle for control over the body’s archaic urges, and the quest for morality in a catastrophically corrupted world, Oates creates magnetic characters of heightened awareness and staggering valor.”
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Booklist
“[This novel] is classic Oates. Its depiction of violence, families falling from grace and social class disparities, as well as its location, recall her 1996 bestseller, WE WERE THE MULVANEYS. Fans of Oates will delight in this offering and newcomers to her work will receive a first-class introduction.”
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BookPage
“Little Bird of Heaven starts with the urgency of thriller, then turns into something more existential as the years (and pages) go by...This is a tragedy on a classical scale...Oates has written a feminist novel with empathy for men, especially men without power, with no voice besides violence.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“[This novel]...has an unnerving clarity about the power of sexual desire...it cleaves to the mind like a strong memory, and after you’ve read it, you may find yourself dreaming about the imaginary town of Sparta, and wondering what the people are doing now.”
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Chicago Sun-Times
“Little Bird of Heaven is at heart a mystery. . . . It has an unnerving clarity about the power of sexual desire, and the trouble it can cause. But it cleaves to the mind like a strong memory, and after you’ve read it, you may find yourself dreaming about the imaginary town of Sparta, and wondering what the people are doing now.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“’Quintessential Joyce Carol Oates: an expertly crafted, lovingly detailed character-driven novel of loss and longing. ”
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Associated Press
“A powerful novel...In Sparta she has created a fictional universe to stand beside Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Cheever’s Shady Hill....Oates [is] our closest contemporary analogue to Hawthorne: lyrical, moral, unforgiving.”
—
Washington Post
“[This is] the novelist at her brooding best . . . a seamless, satisfying tale of small-town life where...the long-smoldering relationships among the residents can often be like ‘tangled roots, beneath the surface of the earth.’”
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Unquestionably one of Oates’ finest novels, rendered in taut, vivid language, with an emotional power. . . . Perhaps more than any other major contemporary writer, Oates is aware of the fraught dynamics of identity in ‘self-made’ American lives. . . . She honors her own complex heritage, and that of all Americans, in her extraordinary fiction.”
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Chicago Tribune Books
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