Purity

A masterpiece from the author of Freedom for these ethically convoluted times

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 Oakland, and 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. Andreas Wolf, a dynamic provocateur who became well-known in the mayhem that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is the brains of TSP. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Purity is a magnificent tale of murder, intense loyalty, and idealistic youth. In The Corrections and Freedom, the author creates a world full of vividly unique characters, such as Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers, and he tracks their intersecting paths through settings both ancient and modern, like the war between the sexes and the ubiquitous Internet. The most audacious and insightful book written by one of the greatest authors of our day is called Purity.