The Gravedigger's Daughter
Joyce Carol Oates
Harper
582 pages
Read in 2009

Beautiful Hazel Jones and her young son Zach are liked and admired by all they meet - but they inspire curiosity too. Why is Zach forbidden to mention his father, and how did Hazel get the scars on her forehead which she takes such pains to hide ? Why do they roam from place to place, settling nowhere and confiding in no one ?
Because Hazel Jones wasn't always Hazel Jones. Once she was Rebecca Schwart, the dark-eyed daughter of German asylum seekers who fled to the US to escape the Nazis. Her father, hampered by language and chained by poverty, could only find work as a gravedigger, and Rebecca and her family lived in a hovel on the edge of the cemetery.
Driven mad by subjection to daily humiliation and destitution, Rebecca's father committed a horrific crime which changed the course of her life forever. But can you ever re-invent yourself in the aftermath of murder - or is history destined to repeat itself ?