Harrow
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A Sunday Times Book of the Year
A Times Paperback of the Year
In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.
'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me ' New Yorker Books of the Year 2021
'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dalí, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' Observer
Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize
Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl'.
In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty.
Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer finalist Williams (The Quick and the Dead) returns with a dystopian saga of environmental cataclysm that is by turns triumphant, damning, and beguiling. Sometime in the near future, Khristen is sent to a boarding school in the desert of the American West by her mother, a woman haunted by the fact that she believes Khristen briefly died as an infant and came back to life. After the school is shut down, Khristen sets off across a decimated landscape only to end up lodging at a remote hotel inhabited by elderly ecoterrorists, visionaries, and would-be assassins, led by their host, Lola. Among these residents, Khristen also meets a strange 10-year-old named Jeffrey, and together they face the environmental ruination and human depravity that mark the new world these characters all inhabit, while still remembering "the old dear stories of possibility" and noting how "no one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them." Rollicking with language that is at once biblical and casual, this builds like a sermon to a fever pitch. Williams's well-known themes of social decline and children in danger are polished to a gorgeous luster in this prescient page-turner. The result serves as both an indictment of current culture and a blazing escape from it.
