How About Them Bones?

Alice Sebold's breakout fiction debut moves into a class by itself


With an impressive 925,000 copies in print after 11 printings, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones has outpaced the sales of any other first novel in memory, reaching Oprah-level numbers in its first month on sale without the endorsement of any TV or newspaper book club. Booksellers are already comparing it to such long-running blockbusters as Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, only to dismiss those examples in the same breath, because they took off much more slowly.

The book hit #1 on Amazon.com six weeks before its publication date, immediately after Anna Quindlen appeared on the Today Show for a summer reading roundup on May 22 and said, "If you read one book this summer, it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in years." Ten days later, New York Times book critic Janet Maslin fanned the flames by touting it on CBS Sunday Morning, while Seventeen magazine ran a first serial in the July issue. Sealing the novel's critical success, Michiko Kakutani described it as "an elegy, much like Alice McDermott's That Night," and deemed it "deeply affecting" in her June 18 review on the front page of the New York Times Arts section. By July 1, just a few days before the book's official pub date, Time magazine's Lev Grossman was confidently declaring it "the breakout fiction debut of the year."

Ever since the book landed at #10 on PW's bestseller list on July 10, it's been a miracle of upward motion. At Borders, the book has remained the #1 hardcover fiction bestseller since July 14. "Often, when there's a buzz on a book, demand peaks out before it even pubs," commented fiction buyer Bridget Mason. "But this one just keeps building bigger and bigger. It's because of the strength of the novel, and it's also very timely," she said, referring to the highly publicized murders of several young girls in the last six months, which echo the book's central drama.

Some stories circulate endlessly, like hot blood, cold river or black economy