The Whiteness of Bones - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Susanna Moore (Paperback)

About the Book

Looking for her place in the alluring world outside the palm groves of her idyllic home in Hawaii, Mamie Clark visits her aunt in New York. As she makes her way through the treacherousness of a society obsessed with drugs, sex, money, and power, she seeks a reconciliation with her own island truths.

Book Synopsis

In her ravishing and moving second novel, the bestselling author of In the Cut tells the story of Mamie Clarke, who sets out to lose herself in New York City.

Having only previously known the fragile, magical world of her childhood on the lush Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, Mamie leaves college to visit her sophisticated aunt in New York. With her beautiful and self-destructive younger sister Claire in tow, Mamie must learn to make her way in a world of money, power, sex, and drugs. Moore's sharp and witty book captures an unforgettable time and place--the Manhattan of the early 80s-- and the powerful feelings engendered there.

Review Quotes

"An utterly wonderful novel. . .I envy everyone who enter, for the first time, its world." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"A remarkably sly balancing act: a deeply sensual, richly imagined coming-of-age story that manages to use a wickedly satiric portrait of the uppercrust in the Manhattan of the early 1980s." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"An alluring novel, sure in its embrace of the reader. . .who is swep away by Moore's eye for detail."--Newsday

"Ms. Moore possesses a finely tuned radar system for phoniness and pretension, and many of her cameo portraits glitter with a Waugh-like black humor. Indeed, she demonstrates in this novel that she not only has a gift for delineating the tragedies of domestic life...but that she also has a capacity for comic invention, for showing what happens when our vanities run amok."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"An engrossing, sensual novel whose characters seem to live from the moment of their introduction and whose plot is both believable and satisfying. In short, The Whiteness of Bones is the kind of book you'll read, re-read, and remember."--West Coast Review of Books

"So evocative you can almost feel the mud between your toes. . . . Moore makes her story as real and mysterious as any island legend, as powerful as the scent of the white ginger flowers." -Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Moore's controlled prose maintains her ambitiously serious intent. As much as women love Colette's and Virginia Woolf's portraits of adored mothers and their daughters, many will identify more with this wounded pair." -Ms.

"Spare but lyrical. . . . An engrossing novel, profoundly disturbing in its message of feminine guilt." -Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably sly balancing act: a deeply sensual, richly imagined coming-of-age story that manages to use a wickedly satiric portrait of the uppercrust in the Manhattan of the early 1980s." -The Philadelphia Inquirer

"An engrossing, sensual novel whose characters seem to live from the moment of their introduction and whose plot is both believable and satisfying. In short, The Whiteness of Bones is the kind of book you'll read, re-read, and remember." -West Coast Review of Books

About the Author

Susanna Moore is from Hawaii but now lives in New York City. She is the author of the novels In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, will be published by the National Geographic Society in 2003.