Best Seller
Orphan
Hardcover
$32.00
Available on Jun 15, 2027 | 352 Pages
An explosive novel about a girl in upstate New York in the late 1980s and the power she takes back from those who underestimate her—a shocking, psychologically suspenseful story of family, class, and revenge by a novelist Gillian Flynn calls “one of the greatest writers among us today.”
“Orphan is superb. This is Joyce Carol Oates at the top of her craft, once again confirming her place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Nelia’s story is devastating, but also hopeful — a deeply moving testament to the human spirit and our capacity to love. I will never forget this book.”
—Belle Burden, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Strangers
“[Orphan is] compulsively readable with a masterfully played ending. Oates is our Balzac, our Dickens, she’s a legend and there will never be anyone like her again.”
—Janet Fitch, #1 New York Times bestselling author of White Oleander
When a young girl’s life is disrupted by events she struggles to understand—the siege of her family’s house by law enforcement officers, the arrest of her father, and the breakup of her family—she becomes an “orphan” haunted by the mystery of what she has lost.
Living with relatives, under the spell of an older, precocious girl cousin, Nelia begins to adjust to altered circumstances; then, reunited with her mother, she finds herself in a new, nightmare “family” from which she is desperate to escape by any means.
A tale written in the register of the American gothic, as mesmerizing as a Grimm fairy tale, Orphan is a compulsively readable, disturbing but ultimately cathartic novel by “a genius in the truest sense of the word” (Rebecca Makkai) who never ceases to enthrall readers with her intimately observed characters and visionary storytelling.
“Orphan is superb. This is Joyce Carol Oates at the top of her craft, once again confirming her place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Nelia’s story is devastating, but also hopeful — a deeply moving testament to the human spirit and our capacity to love. I will never forget this book.”
—Belle Burden, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Strangers
“[Orphan is] compulsively readable with a masterfully played ending. Oates is our Balzac, our Dickens, she’s a legend and there will never be anyone like her again.”
—Janet Fitch, #1 New York Times bestselling author of White Oleander
When a young girl’s life is disrupted by events she struggles to understand—the siege of her family’s house by law enforcement officers, the arrest of her father, and the breakup of her family—she becomes an “orphan” haunted by the mystery of what she has lost.
Living with relatives, under the spell of an older, precocious girl cousin, Nelia begins to adjust to altered circumstances; then, reunited with her mother, she finds herself in a new, nightmare “family” from which she is desperate to escape by any means.
A tale written in the register of the American gothic, as mesmerizing as a Grimm fairy tale, Orphan is a compulsively readable, disturbing but ultimately cathartic novel by “a genius in the truest sense of the word” (Rebecca Makkai) who never ceases to enthrall readers with her intimately observed characters and visionary storytelling.
Author
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”
Learn More about Joyce Carol Oates
