Sharp Objects
Camille Preaker is a Chicago newspaper reporter and a self-harmer in fragile recovery when her editor sends her back to Wind Gap, Missouri, the small Ozarks pork town she left a decade earlier, to report on the murder of one pre-teen girl and the disappearance of another. She moves back into her mother Adora's plantation-style house, tries to stay sober, and finds herself sharing a roof with a half-sister, Amma, a polished thirteen-year-old who is already one person at home and an entirely different one in the woods. The more Camille learns about Wind Gap's closed-ranks response to the killings, the more she has to face the specific, intimate nature of the harm her family has always done. Gillian Flynn's 2006 debut is a short, deliberate Southern gothic about women who hurt themselves and women who hurt each other.
Themes & atmosphere
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What you might want to know about Sharp Objects
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Reporter Camille Preaker, fresh out of a psych hospital, returns to her Missouri hometown of Wind Gap to write about the killing of two preteen girls. She is forced to stay with the mother she barely escaped.
Yes. HBO produced an eight-episode Sharp Objects miniseries in 2018, starring Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson. The show is widely considered one of the strongest psychological-thriller adaptations.
No. Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl are all standalone novels by Gillian Flynn with no shared characters. They share her interest in unreliable narrators and dark family histories.
Sharp Objects was written by Gillian Flynn by Three Rivers Press.
Sharp Objects is 312 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Sharp Objects takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Sharp Objects is a standalone novel by Gillian Flynn, not part of a series.
Sharp Objects is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.