NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book
“So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent” (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from “the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation” (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads
Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother—her only family—is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life.
A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world—including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.
The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Hometown:
New York, New York
Date of Birth:
1959
Place of Birth:
Western Springs, Illinois
Education:
B.A., Swarthmore College, 1981; studied as a Fulbright scholar at Freie Universität in Berlin
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Jonathan Franzen begins this novel, his latest, with bodies. In the very first scene, Anabel’s eyelid is twitching, or she thinks it is; so she says to her overwrought daughter, Pip Tyler, who is working as an “outreach specialist” for an energy company. Pip, whose full name is Purity, is used to the troubles of […]
September marks the release of new novels by such masters of the form as Jonathan Franzen, Jan Karon, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood, as well as relative newcomers like Meg Mitchell Moore (whose novel The Admissions is perfectly timed to the start of a new school year) and Lauren Groff, whose brilliant Fates and Furies […]
