A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of ` Freedom` & ` 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 Oakl&, & 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 underst&, & the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right & wrong. Jonathan Franzen`s Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, & murder. The author of The Corrections & Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters
- Californians & East Germans, good parents & bad parents, journalists & leakers
- & he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet & as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring & penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.