Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.

Joyce Carol Oates

Jun 2020 · HarperCollins UK

About this ebook

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society

Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.

Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.

Ratings and reviews

Carol Oates fills over 800 pages by detaily repeating scenes already described when one of the protagonists remembers them or tells someone about them on the phone. Does she think her readers have such short memories? The five children of the family are incredibly different in looks and characters, they seem so constructed that they must be adopted. It is hard to keep turning so many pages filled with people the author herself seems to have disliked. They are so full of self-pitying and hatred. It is not credible that grown-up children with lives of their own should be so shaken by the death of their not so healthy father in his mid-sixties that 3 of 5 of them contemplate suicide. Mrs Oates does not seem to know that there were alternatives for females in 2010 from being career-oriented virginal spinsters or housewives who totally depend on their unfaithful husbands for these are the only types that appear in this book.

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.