The Gravedigger's Daughter
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| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Ecco Press |
| Released | June 1, 2007 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 592 |
| ISBN | 0061236829 (first edition) |
| Preceded by | White Girl/Black Girl |
The Gravedigger's Daughter is a 2007 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 36th published novel, since the appareance of her first With Shuddering Fall in 1964.
[edit] Synopsis
Young and troubled housewife Rebecca Tignor is mistaken by a young man for another woman named Hazel Jones, one afternoon in the woods nearby Chatauqua Falls, N.Y. in the fall of 1959. It will be over twenty years later, when Rebecca will find out that the man who approached her is a brutal serial killer. But there's much more to the plot than that: Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis in 1936, foreseeing the oncoming Holocaust; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob Schwart, who has lost his intellectual dreams and has become a gravedigger and cemetery caretaker in Milburn, N.Y., abruptly kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before blowing his own head off. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten and almost killed by her own husband, the brutal and violent Niles Tignor. She and her only son, Niles Jr. (Niley) flee in a panic and to save herself, she becomes the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken, purposefully adopting the identity of Hazel Jones, whereas Niley, assumes the alias of Zacharias. As Hazel, Rebecca seeks many livelihoods, as alternately a waitress, clerk and finally, the cool, composed and sophisticated mistress of the overwhelmingly wealthy heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never felt the need to confide her past, until it starts to violently catch up with her, when the killer comes back to haunt her.
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