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Alice Sebold certainly knows how to grab her readers' attention. Consider this first sentence from her best-selling 1999 memoir, Lucky: "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered."

And the opener from her first novel, 2002's The Lovely Bones: "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."

And here's how Sebold begins her latest, The Almost Moon: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

It's as if she were practically daring you not to read compulsively until suddenly it's 2 a.m. and you realize, bleary-eyed, that you have to get up for work in four hours.

But Sebold demurs when asked about her trademark opening lines, claiming she doesn't spend much time or thought on them. Instead, she writes them quickly so she can get on to the business of storytelling.

"It takes me so long to find the character, by the time I find her, it feels like she's been waiting around tapping her foot for years. She's impatient and ready to tell her story," Sebold says during a phone interview from her home in San Francisco, which she shares with her husband, Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold.

Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, sold more than 1.8 million copies in its first year of release and went on to become on one of the top-selling novels of the decade. After that head-spinning success, she is probably prepared for most anything this new novel brings her way. Yet one thing made her nervous: having her own mother read a book about a daughter who is driven to murder.

Her mother's verdict? "She liked it," Sebold says. "I'm very lucky that my mom's a big reader. She's able to understand that fiction writers work with material that's there for a reason. She's a very sophisticated, intelligent reader.

"I was fearful," she continues. "But family relationships do continue to surprise you if you're open to being surprised."

Certainly the family dynamic in The Almost Moon is anything but predictable. Helen Knightly has spent her life coping with her mother's mental illness. Often cruel and distant, her mother suffers agoraphobia so severe she can't leave the house without being wrapped head to toe in blankets. When Helen gets her first period, her mother—who can't bear not to be a part of this rite of passage—accompanies her to the drugstore fully cloaked in blankets.

After her father's death, Helen spends years taking care of her aging mother, driven by a toxic mix of duty, guilt and resentment.

"For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless," says Helen. "I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors' appointments, first with blankets and then with towels to hide the world from her."

Finally, Helen snaps. During the next 24 hours, she grapples with what she's done, and what she should do next. Her still-devoted ex-husband flies in from across country to help her cover her tracks, but ultimately, Helen has to decide whether to face up to her mother's death.

Remarkably, although the book unfolds within a 24-hour period, the story never feels claustrophobic. The Almost Moon is incredibly fast-paced; it's the jittery, forceful story of a woman who sifts through her past to discover what brought her to such desperation. Readers, in turn, are compelled to acknowledge some of their own darkest thoughts. It may not be an easy read, but it's supremely rewarding.

Writing an entire book set in a single day is the kind of challenge Sebold savors, much like telling The Lovely Bones in the voice of a dead teenager.

"I like to break rules," she says. Telling a story in 24 hours allowed her to explore "pressures and limitations and what they can inspire. I am drawn to things that are going to force me into a corner."

After The Lovely Bones, Sebold found a certain freedom to break any rules she wanted. Her success brought financial security, to be sure, but she also no longer felt compelled to explain her writing choices.

"I decided I was just going to do my work," she recalls. "I realized if I concerned myself worrying in a micromanaging way about being judged, literally my head was going to explode."

The only opinion she seeks is her husband's. Sebold met Gold in the 1990s while both were attending the University of California-Irvine's writing program. They are successful novelists with very different approaches to their work. Gold, she says, is "Mr. Research," and shares regular progress reports on his work. Sebold, meanwhile, is a more solitary writer, allowing Gold to edit her but not talking much about plotting and characters.

"He only knows what's going on in my book when he reads the pages," she said.

While The Lovely Bones was Sebold's breakthrough book, she believes her memoir Lucky has also had a major impact. The searingly honest portrayal of the aftermath of being raped as an undergraduate has, she hopes, opened up the national conversation about rape.

"I think it helped make it an easier conversation," she says. "It familiarizes strangers with the experience in a way that decreases the isolation."

With just three books to her name, Sebold already has created an enduring body of work that is both wise and thought-provoking. Even so, she acknowledges she has a lot more to say.

"The luxury of being a writer," she said, "is that you don't retire."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

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Read a review of The Lovely Bones.

At first blush it is a surprise to hear Ann Patchett say, "I do think of myself as a social and political novelist." Her previous novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and became an enduring favorite of book groups, is widely regarded as one of the best love stories of recent decades. And her scintillating new novel, Run, will surely be considered by many of its most avid readers the very thing she seems to fear most:" a heartwarming family drama."

But to Patchett's point, the romance in Bel Canto blooms amid the political and emotional turmoil of a terrorist takeover at a tony international gathering in South America. And Run, which concerns the family of a former Boston mayor, often rings with the hopeful political oratory of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, while raising large questions about our responsibilities for people beyond our immediate bloodlines.

"I come from a very complicated family, with tons of stepbrothers and stepsisters," Patchett says, with a characteristic mix of good humor and passion. "That is so much at the core of my imagination. You know? Who is your family? Who do you love? Who do you have responsibility to? My mother was married to my stepfather from the time I was five until I was 25. He had four children. My mother is married to someone else now who I love very much, and he has three children. Where are my levels of love and responsibility to all these people? I come from the school that if you spend a night in my house, you're my family. And you're my family forever."

The family in the novel Run is less extended but no less complicated than Patchett's own. As the book opens, Bernard Doyle, a widower and former mayor of Boston, is alienated from his oldest son Sullivan and now hopes to see his own thwarted political ambitions realized through his adopted African-American sons Tip and Teddy. Neither of these boys is particularly interested in a political life. Tip, the more brilliant of the two, studies ichthyology at Harvard; Teddy considers becoming a Catholic priest, like the elderly uncle he is devoted to. The story begins with Bernard dragging the two boys to a speech by Jesse Jackson as a blizzard descends upon Boston.

Patchett says her characters developed as she imagined a father who wants to raise one of his children to save the world. "When I first started the book I thought if you were really going to save the world in this present day, really help people, you would do it through science. Then I thought about religion. Then ultimately, over a period of a very long time, I came to politics. I decided you have the best chance of effecting real change through politics. So I thought a lot about Joe Kennedy and a lot about the three brothers in The Brothers Karamazov. So for me the book comes from trying to think deeply about the world, from a place of intellect and problem-solving."

According to Patchett, problem-solving and intellect also characterize her usual approach to writing fiction. During a call to her home in Nashville, where she has lived much of her life and where two-and-a-half years ago she married a local doctor after an 11-year courtship, Patchett says, "My standard line is that writing is like taking a car trip. If I don't know where I'm going and I don't have a map, I don't get there. I understand a lot of writers say if they knew where they were going, there would be no point in writing, that a book is the process of figuring out where it is going. But I need to know how it's going to end before I start."

Still, the composition of Run presented Patchett with a number of surprises. "I imagined the story would take place over about four months . . . and then I realized I was on page 140 and I was only two or three hours into the story. The level of intensity in which everything is called into question is so enormous that none of the characters can turn away from the action, so I had to stay with them and write a book that takes place over the course of 24 hours."

Nor did Patchett's original road map include the marvelous Kenya, a talented 11-year-old girl whose mother is seriously injured when she saves Tip from an oncoming car and whose quiet assertion that she is the adopted brothers' sister sets off the intense moral and emotional quest of the novel. "I hadn't planned for that, Patchett says, but then Kenya moved forward and I thought, well, I'm going to let her rise into that role."

Patchett, who spent 12 years in Catholic school (and jokes that as a result when her writing is stuck she "runs the vacuum, or dusts, or cooks, or I iron my husband's handkerchiefs. I'm a great wife. And I enjoy it!") adds: "In the same way that I like writing a book that has religion in it but is in no way about religion, I like a book that has people of different races in it without it being about race. Somehow, whenever I see a book that has white people and black people in it, it's a book about race, and that seems wrongheaded and untrue to the experience of life. The stakes are higher when you imagine people farther from your own experience, but the farther your characters are from your experience, the more likely you are to work to make sure they are fully realized characters."

"The value of literary fiction," Patchett says near the end of our conversation, "is that the writer brings half and the reader brings half. You have to leave enough space to let the book become something different with each reading. To me Run is about social responsibility. But I don't want it to be a polemic. I can't devalue what it becomes in anyone else's hands. I have left it open for readers to make it their own book. And if they make it into a heartwarming family drama, and that works for them and it teaches them something, then the book is a success."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.