List $29.95

Written by Joyce Carol Oates - Audio book performed by J. Todd Adams - Abridged Fiction - 5 CASSETTES - 7 hours

Publisher, HighBridge Audio (March 2001)

The printed edition of this title is an Oprah's Book Club Selection!

"The Mulvaney's get under our skin and demand that we pay attention." --New York Newsday

"Esthetically, it's a joy to watch a pro like Ms. Oates take apart this proud, happy and likable family step by inexorable step....while making you hope all along that she'll spare them. And the modest measure of recompense and reconciliation she eventually hands the survivors doesn't outrage our sense of probability, however our sense of justice may suffer....Occasionally Ms. Oates's prose sounds canned and careless....but she gives us enough small luminous moments to carry several novels....Still, {the novel} works not---simply because of its meticulous details and gestures, or because 'family' is a hot-button issue these days, or because Ms. Oates has borrowed the primal narrative of Western culture to give her story subliminal oomph. Mere hard work and canny calculation could get a writer that far. What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is something stronger and spookier: her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself." --David Gates, The New York Times Book Review

You will not read a novel more enthralling, more moving, more unforgettably illumined by profoundly human truth than this story of the rise, the fall, and the ultimate redemption of an American family. That family is the Mulvaneys, seemingly blessed by everything that makes life sweet---a successful, hard-working father, a loving mother, three fine sons, and a sweet and pretty daughter. Their residence is picture-perfect High Point Farm, long since converted from actual farming to the cultivation of the joys of country living for adults and children alike. Their position in the community of Mt. Ephraim, New York, seems secure. Yet something happens on Valentine's Day, 1976---an incident involving sixteen-year-old Marianne that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home---that causes the bottom to fall out of their world. The impact of this event reverberates throughout the novel as Mike Sr. fights in both barrooms and courtrooms to restore his family's honor, his sons risk everything to right the wrong done to their beloved sister, while Marianne herself spends years drifting before she finds genuine love and fulfillment with a decent man, satisfying work, and a family of her own. It is the youngest son, Judd, now a newspaperman, who sets himself the task of documenting his family's history - to recall its luminous moments and what seemed a special gift for happiness. The many secrets they kept from each other threatened to destroy them, but ultimately We Were the Mulvaneys celebrates the human miracle that allowed this family to bridge the chasms that had opened up between them, to reunite in the spirit of love and healing.

About the Author: Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including Broke Heart Blues, We Were The Mulvaneys, Black Water, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. A recipient of the National Book Award and The PEN/ Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.