Thrust
A Novel
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
THRUST IS:
“Epic.” –The New York Times
“A triumph.” —Elle
“Stunningly beautiful.” —The Daily Beast
“Both of the moment and utterly timeless.” —Chicago Review of Books
“A book to take in wide-eyed.” —Rebecca Makkai
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a "carrier" travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history
Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins—vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisvė, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisvė must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives—and their shared dream of freedom.
A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust will leave no reader unchanged.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The blistering and visionary latest from Yuknavitch (The Book of Joan) follows a time-traveling girl on the run with her father in a bleak near future. Laisvė, an enchanted and motherless girl, keeps company with worms and whales as she flees with her single father from "Raids" perpetrated by ICE-like squads, "armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets" of The Brook, a city suffused by water and comprising much of what appears to be Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. But Laisvė has a gift; she is a "carrier," able to move through time with the aid of a talking box turtle and reach fellow outsiders hailing from various points in history, arriving to help unroot them from the nightmares of their time. There is Mikael, the imprisoned "floating boy" of possibly criminal character in 1995; the early 21st century Mohawk laborer Joseph, filled with visions of his people; the 19th-century sculptor Frédéric, designer of the Statue of Liberty (the arduous construction of which becomes a recurring motif); and Aurora, who loses a leg during the Civil War and later becomes a sex worker. As Laisvė visits different periods of the region's history, there are taxonomies of beasts and bugs, and meditations on Amazonian fungi that give way to histories of vanished peoples and their imprint on the land they worked. "Stories are quantum," as Laisvė narrates, and Yuknavitch preserves the courage and eccentricity of her subjects by subverting any impulse toward rote orthodox storytelling. Instead, she offers a cracked mirror, an untethered dream, and a catch-all for myriad strands of history through which the reader may pleasurably roam free. This is the author's best yet.
