The book's 'bones', above all, cease to be those of Susie's never-found body, or the animal bones her creepy killer plays with to distract himself from other young girls instead they become 'lovely', being connections between loved ones 'that happened after I was gone. Time inevitably passes ('however haphazardly, everyone I'd known was growing up'), bringing its own patterns of healing and meaning. Not much is possible from heaven, though Susie makes occasional contact with those she misses.

They are characters from an above-average TV movie inhabiting this new 'ground zero' - the sharp-witted sister, the distracted mother, the too-hurt father, the ethnic boy, the life-is-tough adolescent girl, the oddball murderer, the tipsy too-ebullient grandmother and the crumpled, touched-by-tragedy detective. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.' Susie Salmon, whose bones are shut in an old safe and sunk in quicksand by her neighbour Mr Harvey, spends the book watching and narrating, from her perfect adolescent heaven, the tale of her loss and the rupture her murder brings about in the lives of her family, her killer and her friends. 'I was 14 when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. 'My name was Salmon, like the fish, first name Susie,' it disarmingly begins. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.' The Lovely Bones, with its posthumous narrator telling the story of her brutal rape and murder and their aftermath, has been a massive seller in the US, garnering comparisons with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. a girl had been murdered and dismembered. This novel, Sebold's first, was clearly born from her own horrific rape experience as a teenager, detailed in her memoir Lucky (1999), whose first paragraph reads: 'In the tunnel where I was raped. The dead 14-year-old heroine of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is stranded in a much less supple, much more primitive and chronological parenthesis.

The lovely bones killer