She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys Blonde and the New York Times Bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction. As Babysitter continues his rampage of abductions and killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.īabysitter is a suspenseful, starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those we cherish most. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on a chilling mission to rectify injustice and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved child-killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together with tragic consequences.

The Falls is a love story gone wrong and righted and it alone places Joyce Carol Oates definitively in the company of the great American novelists.From one of America’s most renowned storytellers - the bestselling author of Blonde - comes a novel about love and deceit, and lust and redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit. Set against the mythic historic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Joyce Carol Oates explores the American family in crisis, but also America itself in the mid-twentieth century. What unfurls is a drama of parents and their children of secrets and sins of lawsuits, murder and eventually redemption. What follows is their passionate love affair, marriage, and children - a seemingly perfect existence.īut the tragedy by which their life together began shadows them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder. At her side throughout, confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby is unexpectedly transfixed by the strange, otherworldly gaze of this plain, strange woman, falling in love with her though they barely exchange a word. 'The Widow Bride of The Falls,' as Ariah comes to be known, begins a relentless, seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. A newlywed, he has left behind his wife, Ariah Erskine, in the honeymoon suite the morning after their wedding. A man climbs over the railings and plunges into Niagara Falls.

The falls by joyce carol oates