My name was Salmon; like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer.

This is Susie Salmon, speaking from heaven - which looks a lot like her school playground - where everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it - except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on Earth. Watching from here, Susie sees her happy suburban family devastated by her death, isolated, even from one another, as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet . . .

`Moving and compelling . . . I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed' Maggie O'Farrell, Sunday Telegraph

`Spare, beautiful and brutal prose . . . The Lovely Bones is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing' The Times

`A work of extraordinary structural originality, finding a fresh way to combine great tenderness of feeling with the most brutal events. You can sense its poise from the very first sentences' Evening Standard