Rust & Stardust: A Novel

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Description

Camden, NJ, 1948. When 11 year-old Sally Horner steals a notebook from the local Woolworth's, she has no way of knowing that 52 year-old Frank LaSalle, fresh out of prison, is watching her, preparing to make his move. Accosting her outside the store, Frank convinces Sally that he's an FBI agent who can have her arrested in a minute-unless she does as he says. This chilling novel traces the next two harrowing years as Frank mentally and physically assaults Sally as the two of them travel westward from Camden to San Jose, forever altering not only her life, but the lives of her family, friends, and those she meets along the way. Based on the experiences of real-life kidnapping victim Sally Horner and her captor, whose story shocked the nation and inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write his controversial and iconic Lolita, this heart-pounding story by award-winning author T. Greenwood at last gives a voice to Sally herself.

Reviews

Library Journal Best of 2018!

San Diego Book Award 2019 winner for Best Published Mystery/Suspense!

Thoughtfully rendered. --Vanity Fair

Chilling...a perfect read. --Bustle

"A beautifully written, unnerving tragedy woven from equal measures of hope and menace."
--Booklist (starred review)

"Heartrending....Readers who relish novels based on true events will be both riveted and disturbed by this retelling of one of America's most famous abduction cases." --Library Journal (starred review)

Fast-moving....T. Greenwood has clearly done her research. --New York Review of Books

"Riveting suspense....Grace touches this dark tale....Greenwood's story will spellbind readers." --Publishers Weekly

Enthralling...Wonderfully researched and written with stirring prose, Rust & Stardust is a gut-wrenching read. --Tulsa Book Review

Well-written and heartbreaking. --Watertown Daily Times

Unflinching but compassionate, Greenwood deftly unravels the devastating layers of malice and carelessness that tore Sally from her family, but also the love and perseverance that eventually brought her home." -- Bryn Greenwood, author of the New York Times bestseller All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

"Greenwood's glowing dark ruby of a novel brilliantly transforms the true crime story that inspired Nabokov's Lolita. Shatteringly original and eloquently written, Rust and Stardust is a lot about how what we believe to be true can shape or ruin a life, and the bright lure of innocence pitted against the murk of evil. So ferociously suspenseful, I found myself holding my breath, and so gorgeous and so unsettling in all the roads it might have taken, I kept rereading pages." --Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and
Cruel Beautiful World

A riveting and thoughtful exploration of how the dark secrets of a terrible crime affect and hurt so many--and how light and hope persist in the face of such horrors. Greenwood writes with such compassion and feeling, and she is such a confident, skillful storyteller, that you'll stay up late to find out the fates of her memorable, beautiful characters. --Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California and Woman No. 17

A harrowing, ripped-from-the-headlines story of lives altered in the blink of an eye, once again proving her eloquence and dexterity as an author." --Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl

A lyrical and haunting meditation on family, love, and survival, this novel--and Sally Horner--stayed with me long after I turned the last page. --Jillian Cantor, author of Margot

Greenwood is unmatched in her innate ability to weave lush, poetic language into a riveting story that hooks the reader from page one. --Amy Hatvany, author of Best Kept Secret, and It Happens All the Time

Author Bio

T. GREENWOOD's novels have sold over 250,000 copies. She has received grants from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, Christopher Isherwood Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Her novel Bodies of Water was a 2014 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist; Two Rivers and Grace were each named Best General Fiction Book at the San Diego Book Awards, and Where I Lost Her was a Globe and Mail bestseller in 2016. Greenwood lives with her family in San Diego.