The Tattooed Girl

Joyce Carol Oates if one of the world's most respected living novelists whose audience has increased significantly with publication of MIDDLE AGE and I'LL TAKE YOU THERE. Her new novel brings us a tale of dark passions, prejudice, and the strange forms that love can take. THE TATTOOED GIRL is an intense, visceral, yet unexpectedly tender novel about a celebrated but reclusive author, Joshua Siegel. Young but in failing health, Siegel reluctantly admits that he can no longer live alone. He launches a search for an assistant and finds Alma. A young woman with synthetic-looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin, she stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past---the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, and the hatred that seethes within her---he has no idea that he is bringing into his home an enemy: an anti-Semite who despises him virulently and unqestioningly. With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges accepted limits of desire.