Set in the fictional town of Hammond, New York, Broke Heart Blues circles around a single figure: John Reddy Heart, a quiet, charismatic young man whose presence leaves a deep mark on everyone who encounters him.

Years later, after a series of tragedies and rumours attach themselves to his name, the town reconstructs its memories of him through fragments—gossip, confession, speculation, nostalgia.

Joyce Carol Oates uses shifting voices and overlapping recollections to explore how communities manufacture myth from ordinary lives. What emerges is less a portrait of one man than a study of desire, moral panic, and the uneasy way adolescence calcifies into legend.

It sits in the same corner of Oates’s work as We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde: American mythmaking examined through the lens of memory, violence, and the distortions of collective storytelling.

First edition hardback.