Mudwoman - Hardcover

"[A] powerful novel...[Oates] deftly interweaves M.R.'s present, memories of her troubled childhood, and her feverish hallucinations...This hypnotic novel suggests that forgetting the past may be the heavy cost that success demands."--The New Yorker

"Uniquely personal... an intriguing departure from token Oates tales."--Huffington Post

"Madness and malevolence squirm on almost every page in Joyce Carol Oates' 38th novel... Oates' dark brilliance is ever evident in her main characters, complex souls with mysterious corners in their psyches..."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This chilling novel opens with a child left to die in a silty riverbed, a memory that no amount of later life success can erase."--O, the Oprah Magazine

"[A] disturbing, psychological thriller."--New York Post

"Oates [displays] the insights into human bonds that make her brilliant....Oates makes [her character's] torment come alive. We grasp her compulsion to return to the mud of the past in order find her true self."--USA Today

"There's a freshness to this novel, a sense of some new, more personal beginning. It's bold... to paint achievement... as just the flip side of victimization--and it's perhaps even bolder to make such visceral drama from the story of a workaholic who finally confronts life unhooked from a keyboard."--New York Times Book Review

"Oates is an extremely visceral writer...Mudwoman is a genuinely unsettling book in which Oates pays her readers the compliment of never letting them settle or even being entirely sure about what they have just read."--Financial Times

"Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel is about many things, but first and foremost it is about the complications of being a high-achieving woman in the 21st century...Oates tells [her protagonist's story] with a detail and relish that's both heartbreaking and fascinating."--Ms. magazine

"[A] disturbing exploration of selfhood...As always, Joyce Carol Oates masterfully evokes a sense of menace, if not malevolence, while drawing her readers deep into the psychology of her characters... a dark, intelligent and deeply compelling novel... which will hold you in its thrall until the end."--Washington Independent Review of Books

The first woman president of a prestigious Ivy League university, Meredith Meukirchen, grappling with her own morality, must take hold of her self-identity when both personal and professional challenges send her on a collision course with the girl she once was and the life she left behind. 50,000 first printing.