A Book of American Martyrs
“In this moving attempt to tell the story in an all-encompassing and objective way, narrators Neil Hellegers, Tavia Gilbert, and Kirsten Potter portray intertwined families as they cope with the assassination. A remorseful tone permeates the ensemble narration, especially in the portrayals of both main characters…[as] they personify one of our nation’s most polarizing issues.”
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Washington Post Top 10 Book That We Loved
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery and Thrillers
In this striking, enormously affecting novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two very different and yet intimately linked American families. Luther Dunphy is an ardent Evangelical who envisions himself as acting out God’s will when he assassinates an abortion provider in his small Ohio town while Augustus Voorhees, the idealistic doctor who is killed, leaves behind a wife and children scarred and embittered by grief.
In her moving, insightful portrait, Joyce Carol Oates fully inhabits the perspectives of two interwoven families whose destinies are defined by their warring convictions and squarely-but with great empathy-confronts an intractable, abiding rift in American society.
A Book of American Martyrs is a stunning, timely depiction of an issue hotly debated on a national stage but which makes itself felt most lastingly in communities torn apart by violence and hatred.
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