Published: 14/05/2020
ISBN: 9781783785179
Granta Books
224 pages

Pew

Catherine Lacey

Fleeing a past they can no longer remember, Pew wakes on a church bench, surrounded by curious strangers.

Pew doesn’t have a name, they’ve forgotten it. Pew doesn’t know if they’re a girl or a boy, a child or an almost-adult. Is Pew an orphan, or something worse? And what terrible trouble are they running from?

Pew won’t speak, but the men and women of this small, god-fearing town are full of questions. As the days pass, their insistent clamour will build from a murmur to a roar, as both the innocent and the guilty come undone in the face of Pew’s silence.

A stranger comes to town, and takes us with them into their estrangement among the denizens of a conservative religious community. The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey

Rachel Kushner, author of, The Mars Room

I consumed it. It is the electric charge we need

Daisy Johnson, author of, Everything Under

The mercurial and electric Catherine Lacey has now conjured up an of-the-moment fable of trauma and projection - one part Kaspar Hauser, one part James Purdy, and one part Rachel Cusk. The pages shimmer with implication

Jonathan Lethem, author of, Motherless Brooklyn

The Author

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels, THE ANSWERS and NOBODY IS EVER MISSING. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta Magazine’s Best Young American Novelists. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Based in Chicago, she is the 2017-2018 John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

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