The Tattooed Girl: A Novel

Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse—young but in failing health—reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma, a young woman covered with bizarre tattoos, who stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past—the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, the virulent hatred that seethes within her—Seigl decides that she is the one, and he has no idea that he is bringing an enemy into his home.With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges the accepted limits of desire.

New York Times Book Review

“Marvelously controlled satire…wonderfully smart and subtle.”

Entertainment Weekly

“Oates takes a tricky look at the nature of hate and its sources.…The Tattooed Girl is a complicated, sometimes sweet story rife with misunderstandings and missteps, unintended hurts and deliberate forgiveness. It will leave a mark.”

Miami Herald

“The Tattooed Girl is a technical wonder…beautiful, enigmatic, chilling.”

Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Ms. Oates is an American literary institution. The Tattooed Girl demonstrates her mastery of her darkly disturbing art.”

Time Out New York

“The Tattooed Girl often burns with frenzy, ignited by Oates’s deft prose… passages blaze with raw, apocalyptic poetry…Oates’s attention to the microscopic surges of the heart truly astonishes.”

Nashville Tennessean

“[A] fine, disturbing novel.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“With her usual cadenced grace, Oates tells a mesmerizing, disturbing tale”

From the Back Cover

Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse—young but in failing health—reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma, a young woman covered with bizarre tattoos, who stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past—the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, the virulent hatred that seethes within her—Seigl decides that she is the one, and he has no idea that he is bringing an enemy into his home.With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges the accepted limits of desire.

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Reviews

News