Purity

There's a short list of the best living authors, and Franzen is easily on it. Purity stands even taller than The Corrections, Freedom, and the underrated Strong Motion. His newest novel gives the reader characters to laugh with and at while also creating excellent and academic conversations about today's society. Purity is a thick, engrossing, and twisting novel peppered with chilling macabre scenes that ends perfectly. Its beauty and reflection on humanity helped me appreciate living today in the United States. Recommended By Jeffrey J., Powells.com

A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom

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.

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 doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

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.

"Purity's plot is a beautiful arabesque....Subplots are doubled and trebled. But the remarkable thing is that the novel does not seem convoluted when you're reading it; to an astonishing degree, the melodramatic swoops of the plot are well orchestrated and thrilling." Elaine Blair, Harper's

"[Purity displays] fierce writing, and it does what fiction is supposed to, forcing us to peel back the surfaces, to see how love can turn to desolation, how we are betrayed by what we believe. It is the most human of dilemmas, with which we all must come to terms...It remains compelling to read Franzen confront his demons, which are not just his but everyone's." David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Franzen's prose is alive with intelligence...the ride is exhilarating." Caleb Crain, The Atlantic

"Purity comes five years after Freedom and 14 years after The Corrections. Both earlier novels were called masterpieces of American fiction; to say the same of Purity might be true but misses the point. Magisterial sweep is now just what Franzen does, and his new novel appears...as a simple, enjoyable reminder of his sharp-eyed presence." Radhika Jones, Time

"Mr. Franzen's most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet...The stories of the characters in Purity zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their psyches and underscoring what seems like Mr. Franzen's determination to build on the steps he took in Freedom to create people capable of change, perhaps even transcendence...Mr. Franzen adroitly dovetails these story lines, using large dollops of Dickensian coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to entertain...Mr. Franzen has added a new octave to his voice." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Franzen may well now be the best American novelist. He has certainly become our most public one, not because he commands Oprah's interest and is a sovereign presence on the best-seller list-though neither should be discounted-but because, like the great novelists of the past, he convinces us that his vision unmasks the world in which we actually live....A good writer will make an effort to purge his prose of clichés. But it takes genius to reanimate them in all their original power and meaning." Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four other novels, most recently The Corrections and Freedom, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project, all published by FSG. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.