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Purity

Purity 1

by Jonathan Franzen
Paperback
Publication Date: 24/08/2015
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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$32.99

A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom and The Corrections.

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 has always concealed her own real name, or how she can 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 organisation 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 dark-hued comedy of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. Franzen has created yet another cast 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. Jonathan Franzen is a major author of our time, and Purity is his edgiest and most searching book yet.

Featured in our Best Books of 2015

ISBN:
9780007532773
9780007532773
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
24-08-2015
Language:
English
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Country of origin:
Australia
Dimensions (mm):
234x154x43mm
Weight:
0.75kg
Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four other novels, most recently The Corrections and Freedom, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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1 Review

Alright Franzen, you're okay with me. You're books are enormous expansive epics about modern human condition and they're dotted with bizzare, awkward-to-read-on-public-transport sex scenes. But you're okay with me.

This book had a murder, an estranged father thing, lots of pseudo-Julian Assange hacktivism and lots and lots of oddly-expressed sexual politics stuff. You might love it, you might hate it but Franzen's writing game very strong and you'd be a fool not to pick it up and see what it's all about.

Contains Spoilers No
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