Pew | Granta

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  • 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 four books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States and Pew. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Vogue, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is a Granta Best of Young American Novelist, a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of the 2021 New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. ‘Biography of X’ is an extract from her novel of the same title, forthcoming in 2023 from Granta Books in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Catherine Lacey on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 162

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey

‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’

An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.

Fiction | Granta Books

Pew

Catherine Lacey

‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’

In Conversation | Granta Books

Catherine Lacey | Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists

Catherine Lacey & Luke Neima

Catherine Lacey discuses voice, characterization and the minute details that bring a story to life