- Published: 06/05/2021
- ISBN: 9781783785193
- 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.
£8.99
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
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Pew
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‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’
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Catherine Lacey discuses voice, characterization and the minute details that bring a story to life