Purity

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

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.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/01/2015
Pages: 576
Weight: 1.8lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9780374239213


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 04/01/2015 pg. 60
Publishers Weekly 05/18/2015
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2015
Publishers Weekly 05/25/2015 pg. 28
Library Journal 07/01/2015 pg. 76
Booklist 07/01/2015 pg. 33
Entertainment Weekly 08/14/2015 pg. 64
New York Times Book Review 08/30/2015 pg. 12
People Weekly 09/07/2015 pg. 44
Entertainment Weekly 09/04/2015 pg. 62
New York Times Book Review 09/06/2015 pg. 22
BookPage 09/01/2015
New York Review of Books 10/22/2015 pg. 24
Kirkus Best Fiction 11/15/2015 pg. 14
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/06/2015 pg. 27
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2016 pg. 9
School Library Journal 02/01/2016 pg. 108
Library Journal 04/01/2015

About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of novels such as The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and Crossroads (2021), and works of nonfiction, including Farther Away (2012) and The End of the End of the Earth (2018), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.