The Tattooed Girl: A Novel

"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

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.

"There is in this novel, as in so much of Oates's fiction, a dark and brooding quality, a determined and unflinching stare at the scars we carry on our souls and the desperate means by which we cling to faith and hope and love." — Washington Post

"Marvelously controlled satire . . .wonderfully smart and subtle." — New York Times Book Review

"Oates takes a tricky look at the nature of hate and its sources. . . . The Tattooed Girl is a complicated, sometimes sweet story rife with misunderstandings and missteps, unintended hurts and deliberate forgiveness. It will leave a mark." — Entertainment Weekly

"Ms. Oates is an American literary institution. The Tattooed Girl demonstrates her mastery of her darkly disturbing art." — Richmond Times-Dispatch