Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes--each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned--becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.
Editorial Reviews
"A ferocious, risk-loving novel...intimate and epic." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Emotionally gripping...eerily seductive." --Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe
"A stunning debut novel...startlingly original...The reader enters an imaginative world as deep as a forest...Ingrid and Astrid are two of the freshest, most engrossing characters to appear in recent memory." --John Perry, San Francisco Chronicle
"White oleander, a beautiful but poisonous plant, is a metaphor for motherhood in this impressive fist novel...Fitch's startlingly apt language relates a story that is both intelligent and gripping." --Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Janet Fitch is the author of the novels White Oleander (Little Brown, 1999), an Oprah Book club selection translated into 24 languages and made into a feature motion picture, Paint It Black (Little, Brown 2006), also widely translated and made into a feature film, and The Revolution of Marina M. (Little, Brown 2017) set during the years of the Russian Revolution. A fourth novel completing Marina's story, Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, will be published by Little, Brown in summer 2019. Fitch lives in her hometown of Los Angeles with her writer husband Andrew Nicholls.
![Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in White features the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. A gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print in the 140 years since its publication. Anne Perry writes in her Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic (set from the “New Edition” of 1861), “[The Woman in White] has lasted, to our great pleasure, because it is superb storytelling about people who engage our minds and our imaginations.”](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/298/633/WomaninWhite2__08350.1659381018.jpg?c=2 "Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in White features the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. A gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity, Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print in the 140 years since its publication. Anne Perry writes in her Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic (set from the “New Edition” of 1861), “[The Woman in White] has lasted, to our great pleasure, because it is superb storytelling about people who engage our minds and our imaginations.”")
