Orphan - by Joyce Carol Oates (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An explosive novel about a girl in upstate New York in the late 1980s and the power she takes back from those who underestimate her--a shocking, psychologically suspenseful story of family, class, and revenge.

"One of the greatest writers among us today."--Gillian Flynn

"A genius in the truest sense of the word."--Rebecca Makkai

When a young girl's life is disrupted by events she struggles to understand--the siege of her family's house by law enforcement officers, the arrest of her father, and the breakup of her family--she becomes an "orphan" haunted by the mystery of what she has lost.

Living with relatives, under the spell of an older, precocious girl cousin, Nelia begins to adjust to altered circumstances; then, reunited with her mother, she finds herself in a new, nightmare "family" from which she is desperate to escape by any means.

A tale written in the register of the American gothic, as mesmerizing as a Grimm fairy tale, Orphan is a compulsively readable, disturbing but ultimately cathartic novel by a literary legend who never ceases to enthrall readers with her intimately observed characters and visionary storytelling.

About the Author

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, We Were the Mulvaneys, and Fox. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 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" and in 2026 received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.