Purity

A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of FREEDOM and THE CORRECTIONS

Young Pip Tyler doesnt know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that shes saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that shes squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother her only family is hazardous. But she doesnt have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how shell ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. 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 who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesnt understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Jonathan Franzens Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.