Alice Sebold

Helen Knightly has spent a lifetime trying to win the love of a mother who had none to spare. She steps over a boundary she never dreamt she would even approach. But while her act is almost unconscious, it also seems like the fulfilment of a lifetime's buried desire.

A novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places.

Reveals how Alice Sebold's life was transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was raped and beaten in a park near campus. This book also chronicles her recovery as she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction.