Celebrated author Joshua Seigl, an idiosyncratic bachelor and confirmed recluse -young but in failing health- reluctantly admits to himself that he must hire a live-in assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma, a young woman covered with bizarre tattoos, who stirs something inside him. Unaware of her torturous past -the abuses she’s suffered, the wrongs she’s committed, the virulent hatred that seethes within her- Seigl decides that she is the one, and he has no idea that he is bringing an enemy into his home.
With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges the accepted limits of desire.

«[A] wonder… beautiful, enigmatic, chilling.» -Miami Herald

«Dark, suspenseful, and trance-like… [Oates’s] novel dances the line between the rational and the mythical…. [It] has all the complex symmetry of a Gothic cathedral.» -Oregonian

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/ Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize.