“My name is Salmon. Like the fish. Susie. Fourteen years old. I was murdered.”

A coming-of-age story with a supernatural twist.

Susie Salmon is a typical 14yo girl, with all the usual preoccupations: she wants to be gorgeous, she has secret crushes, and favourite things. There’s just one small difference: Susie is dead, lured into a hideaway in a cornfield, and subsequently raped and murdered.

From beyond the grave, she now observes her grieving family: her father, obsessed with finding her killer and getting justice; her mother, looking to escape the unbearable pain of losing her child by forging a new life; and her clever sister, discovering boys and embarking of the journey that Susie herself never had the chance to take.

And Susie is trying to find a way to help.

Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel turned the horror-thriller trope of a crime and its aftermath into an elegiac meditation on life, love and loss. As she herself wrote: “the line between the living and the dead could be murky and blurred.”

Award-winning British playwright Bryony Lavery has taken Sebold’s beautiful novel and created a visceral performance text, both sparse and dense, that also surprises with its humour and verve.

New Theatre is thrilled to be presenting the Australian premiere of this work.

“A stunning adaptation” British Theatre Guide