"This is a remarkable novel from a writer who has given us many. But with The Gravedigger's Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates has given us her masterpiece, a truly gripping testament to the resilience of the human spirit."

--Michael Connelly

"Rendered in taut, vivid language, with an emotional power.... Perhaps more than any other major contemporary writer, Oates is aware of the fraught dynamics of identity in 'self-made' American lives She honors her own complex heritage, and that of all Americans, in her extraordinary fiction."

--Chicago Tribune

Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late-twentieth-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed authorJoyce Carol Oates's previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger's Daughter.

When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects, her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her longtime lover, Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers' son, Aaron, and Eddy Diehl's daughter, Krista, become obsessed with each other, each believing the other's father is guilty.

Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love, and redemptive yearning.