The Incendiaries
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
'Absolutely electric' Garth Greenwell
'A major talent' Financial Times
'Reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History' New Yorker
Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall fall in love at university.
Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn't tell anyone she blames herself for her mother's recent death.
Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers from Bible college.
But a charismatic former student draws Phoebe into his cult - an extremist group with secretive ties to North Korea. When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears. Will devotes himself to finding her, tilting into obsession himself, discovering how far we can go when we lose what we love.
'An important new writer' The Times
'R. O. Kwon is the real deal' Lauren Groff
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written in dazzling, spare prose, Kwon's debut tells the fractured story of three young people looking for something to believe in while attending the prestigious Edwards University. There's Will Kendall, a one-time "kid evangelist" who transferred from a Bible college after losing his faith in God. He soon meets and falls in love with Phoebe Lin, a Korean-American pianist wrestling with the death of her mother in an accident for which she blames herself. And then there's John Leal, a charismatic cult leader and former Edwards student who claims to have been held captive in North Korea; he offers Phoebe the supposedly noble cause she craves. Will watches in horror as Phoebe joins Leal's so-called Jejah, a circle of quasi-religious radicals that soon sinks into right-wing terrorism targeting abortion clinics. Phoebe disappears following a fatal accident involving members of her group, leaving Will to untangle Leal's web of deceit and find out what happened to Phoebe. Kwon's novel expertly addresses questions of faith and identity while managing to be formally inventive in its construction (the stream-of-consciousness style, complete with leaps between characters, amplifies the subject matter). In this intriguing cult story, Kwon thoroughly explores her characters' motivations, making for an urgent and disarming debut. , Correction: this review originally misspelled a character's name.
