Mudwoman: A Novel - Softcover

"[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

"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

"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

"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

"[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

"[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

"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

"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

Explores the high price of success in the life of one woman—the first female president of an ivy league university—and her hold upon her self-identity in the face of darkly shrouded secrets from her past. By the best-selling author of A Widow's Story. Reprint 30,000 first printing.