The Radiance

From Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar, a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture— “bordering at times on the ineffable” (Mary Gaitskill).

A writer escapes the city to live by a pond in a small rural enclave, like a latter-day Thoreau. After a near-fatal hit-and-run, something spiritual inside him awakens. Caught between revelation and madness, an uncanny pull toward a brilliant colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both.

The Radiance is a campus novel, a mystery, an erotic entanglement, and an inquiry into what the soul contains—rendered without irony and without piety. Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, it asks not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.