Alice Sebold

Susie Salmon narrates The Lovely Bones (2002) from a private heaven, describing the day a neighbour lured her into a hollow in a cornfield and killed her, then watching her parents, her sister and the stalled investigation from a distance she cannot cross. Alice Sebold's second book sat on the bestseller lists for years, and Peter Jackson filmed it in 2009 with Saoirse Ronan as Susie. Her first, the memoir Lucky (1999), described an attack she survived as a first-year student at Syracuse University in 1981. Anthony Broadwater, convicted on her identification and sentenced in 1982, served sixteen years in prison; a New York court cleared him in November 2021 after the hair comparison used at his trial was discredited. Sebold apologised publicly, and her publisher withdrew the memoir from distribution.