Purity

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, the author of Crossroads Young Pip Tyler doesnt know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that shes saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that shes squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her motherher only familyis hazardous. But she doesnt have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how shell ever have a normal life. 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 worldincluding, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesnt understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.