Mudwoman

Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco Press

448 pages, Rs 776

A new novel from one of America’s most prolific and respected novelists. ‘Mudgirl’ is a child abandoned by her mother in the silty flats of the Black Snake River and later adopted by a well-meaning couple who quarantine her poisonous history behind the barrier of their Quaker values. Meredith ‘MR’ Neukirchen is the first woman president of a prestigious Ivy League university. A reckless trip upstate thrusts her into an unexpected psychic collision with Mudgirl and the life MR believes she has left behind.