Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Sacrifice: A Novel
    Ebook346 pages6 hours

    The Sacrifice: A Novel

    By Joyce Carol Oates

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates returns with an incendiary novel that illuminates the tragic impact of sexual violence, racism, brutality, and power on innocent lives and probes the persistence of stereotypes, the nature of revenge, the complexities of truth, and our insatiable hunger for sensationalism.

    When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice—of innocence, truth, trust, and, ultimately, of lives. Unfolding in a succession of multiracial voices, in a community transfixed by this alleged crime and the spectacle unfolding around it, this profound novel exposes what—and who—the “sacrifice” actually is, and what consequences these kind of events hold for us all.

    Working at the height of her powers, Oates offers a sympathetic portrait of the young girl and her mother, and challenges our expectations and beliefs about our society, our biases, and ourselves. As the chorus of its voices—from the police to the media to the victim and her family—reaches a crescendo, The Sacrifice offers a shocking new understanding of power and oppression, innocence and guilt, truth and sensationalism, justice and retribution.

    A chilling exploration of complex social, political, and moral themes—the enduring trauma of the past, modern racial and class tensions, the power of secrets, and the primal decisions we all make to protect those we love—The Sacrifice is a major work of fiction from one of our most revered literary masters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 27, 2015
    ISBN9780062332998
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    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.

    Read more from Joyce Carol Oates

    Related to The Sacrifice

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      ‘The City We Became’ Turns New York’s Boroughs Into Multiracial Avatars

      Mar 12, 2020

      N.K. Jemisin’s science fiction novel wastes no time with preliminaries. It’s a ferocious parable of modern race relations.

      2 min read

    • Article

      January Fiction

      Dec 14, 2021

      The Maid by Nita Prose HarperCollins, £14.99 Molly Gray, the narrator of Nita Prose’s startlingly good debut novel, is a young woman who knows her place—and who rather likes it. For “approximately four years, 13 weeks, and five days” she’s been worki

      2 min read

    • Article

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?

      Aug 8, 2019

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings

      Jun 1, 2021

      Black Turtlenecks, Hoop Earrings
      18 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      The Only Rule

      Jul 13, 2020

      There is only one rule in polite English society, but it is iron clad. Of course, polite English society is a fiction. For one thing, its members are rarely polite. Politeness is for the middle classes rather than those who live off ancestral acres o

      5 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Way Back Home

      Apr 30, 2022

      Morning light in Sydney has a quality of powdered gold, spilt celestial talcum. It gets up the nose. The streets seem to have nothing to think about other than parking and shopping, violence a concept from another hemisphere. The calm seems deliberat

      6 min read

    • Article

      THE PRINCE of All Stars

      Sep 3, 2020

      THE PRINCE of All Stars
      9 min read

    • Article

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • Article

      Flood The World With Beauty

      Nov 1, 2019

      A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, par

      8 min read

    • Article

      Guided To Grainger’s Grave

      May 19, 2022

      SEND FORUM SUBMISSIONS TO THE EDITOR: DRSUTTON@FORTEANTIMES.COM Last night I found a smudge of lipstick on my Covid mask. I don’t drink or suffer memory lapses and have no recollection of any intimate encounter that might have created this crimson bl

      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • Article

      Dance with Me

      Sep 17, 2021

      Dance with Me
      9 min read

    • Article

      Come Stay

      Jan 16, 2024

      Come Stay
      23 min read

    • Article

      Siempre Selena

      Jan 21, 2020

      Siempre Selena
      14 min read

    Reviews for The Sacrifice

    4/5

    43 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A teenage black girl is found in an abandoned building in New Jersey. She has been beaten and sexually abused; racist phrases are written on her body. Her Mother has been looking for her for days. At the hospital, she says she was abducted by white police, gang raped and beaten across a few days, then left to die. But her story doesn't add up. As the police try to investigate, the girl and her Mother refuse to cooperate. Eventually, she becomes an icon of white police abuse against the black community, the story growing as more donations come in, regardless of the truth of the allegations.Written in Joyce Carol Oates' unique voice, The Sacrifice is a thought-provoking read. It is a story that delves into the relationship between a mother and daughter who live in poverty, trying to survive in a tough neighborhood. It is also about the distrust of a community of the police, and the exploitation of a teenager by radical religious organizations for attention and money-making.
    • 4/5
      My first read by this author. I very much enjoyed her style of writing. I may have to try some of her other books!
    • 4/5
      Joyce Carol Oates clearly regards the old adage to “write what you know” in some contempt. While her new novel is set in her native New Jersey, the protagonists range from a police detective of Hispanic ancestry to an African American teenage girl living in a poverty-ravaged neighborhood in Biscayne. At the opening of the book, Ednetta Frye searches frantically for her missing daughter, Sybilla. Sybilla will be found in the basement of a derelict factory, bound and battered. Her story of what happened to her, as well as her mother’s reaction, will lay bare the ever simmering racial tension still present in the late 1980s in a city deeply affected and still scarred by riots twenty years earlier. Although it proceeds at a breakneck pace, this is a hard book to read. Oates does not shy away from the dark underside of human behavior and here there is no victim who is entirely free of blame. I’m not entirely sure what to think about this book, that creates villains only to humanize them, and never hesitates to look at complicated and muddy situations. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading her previous novel with a similar theme, them, sometime soon.
    • 5/5
      Another great book by Joyce Carol Oates. In this one, she tackles the issue of sacrificial lambs, victimhood and poverty, set in the very topical context of racism -- specifically when it comes to the justice/policing systems. Sybilla Frye is found nearly dead after being sexually assaulted by (she claims) "white cops". Her story may or may not be true...some things don't seem to add up. But she is definitely a victim of abuse, neglect, poverty and exploitation by people who have their own agendas. Sybilla's best interests are sacrificed to these agendas. And, she is not the only person sacrificed in the search for truth, or in the attempts to cover it up. Very nuanced approach to so many issues and characters....amazing.