My Life as a Rat
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
A brilliant and thought-provoking novel about family, loyalty and betrayal
Once I’d been Daddy’s favourite. Before something terrible happened.
Violet Rue is the baby of the seven Kerrigan children and adores her big brothers. What’s more, she knows that a family protects its own. To go outside the family – to betray the family – is unforgiveable. So when she overhears a conversation not meant for her ears and discovers that her brothers have committed a heinous crime, she is torn between her loyalty to her family and her sense of justice. The decision she takes will change her life for ever.
Exploring racism, misogyny, community, family, loyalty, sexuality and identity, this is a dark story with a tense and propulsive atmosphere – Joyce Carol Oates at her very best.
Reviews
‘Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going’ Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl
'I stand in awe before such an unresting hunger for the literary endeavour' Rose Tremain
‘My Life as a Rat is Oates at her best – a powerful, uncompromising story that explores racism, misogyny and recent American history’ Kate Saunders, The Times
‘Sexism, rape, racism. Murder, sadism – fans will savour this stew of typical Oatsian nasties, in which 12-year old Violet is cruelly exiled from her family … the odyssey her psyche endures is served well by Oates’s juttery, rough-edged prose’ Mail on Sunday
‘Oates’s novel adroitly touches on race, loyalty, misogyny, and class inequality while also telling a moving story with a winning narrator. This book should please her fans and win her new ones’ Publishers Weekly
‘Oates’s prose contains a deep-felt rawness which hovers between hope, despair and love’ Guardian
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN / Malamud Award, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs and Hazards of Time Travel. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oates's remarkable latest (after 2018's Hazards of Time Travel) chronicles how a 12-year-old girl's fate is determined after her family disowns her. The story opens in 1991 as Violet Rue Kerrigan, the youngest in a large Irish-Catholic family where loyalty is highly valued, grows up doted on by her loving but short-tempered father. She witnesses what later turns out to be her eldest brothers, teenagers Jerome and Lionel, attempting to get rid of evidence that they had participated in the racially charged beating of a high school kid. Violet's guilt compounded by Lionel assaulting her and the death of their victim makes her blurt out the truth unsolicited. Her parents, who can't bring themselves to believe the truth about their sons, send Violet to live with an aunt in an upstate New York town 80 miles away. Violet spends her life hoping for her family's change of heart and worrying about her brothers' retaliation. Her urge to not betray anyone again makes her vulnerable to sexual abuse by a teacher and a lecherous uncle. Despite it all, Violet becomes a survivor who ekes out a living through manual labor and manages to attend college at night. Oates's novel adroitly touches on race, loyalty, misogyny, and class inequality while also telling a moving story with a winning narrator. This book should please her fans and win her new ones.
