Purity Purity

Purity

A Novel

    • 4.1 • 347 Ratings
    • $12.99

Publisher Description

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.

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.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2015
September 1
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
576
Pages
PUBLISHER
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
SELLER
Macmillan
SIZE
4.4
MB

Customer Reviews

JudyTApple ,

Purity

Loved it. It just got me through a week of being “sheltered in place” during the Covid 19 pandemic. It was Iike a movie I couldn’t wait to get back to. I was raised in the SF East Bay and have lived in Santa Cruz for many years so I enjoyed all the local references. Absorbing and distracting which is just what I needed. Mr. Franzen continues to be one of my favorite writers.

Scott's take on things ,

Beautiful and Monotonous in Equal Measure

There are many fascinating characters in this novel and the plot has a more edge-of-your-seat feeling than other Franzen novels. But the intricacies of the constant psychological battles the characters have with each other can feel never ending sometimes. And the three female leads — Pip, Anabel, and Katya — are too closely cut from the same cloth.

turg2323 ,

A modern classic

Psychologically and emotionally dense, true, and profound. The title suggests its theme is morality, but for me it was more about the power of data--be it information or secrets--and how people choose to use it.

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