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

Pew

Catherine Lacey

‘I consumed it. It is the electric charge we need’ Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under

One Sunday morning, a mysterious silent figure is found sleeping in a church in an unnamed American town. The congregants call this amnesiac ‘Pew’ and seek to uncover who they are: their age; their gender, their race, their intentions. Are they an orphan, or something worse? What terrible trouble is Pew running from? And why won’t they speak?

Unable to agree on how to treat a person they cannot categorize – whether to adopt or imprison, help or harm them – this small town is quickly undone by Pew’s terrifying silence. What remains is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: our borders and our boundaries, our fears and our woes.

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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