WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for
the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book
Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce
Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of
2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020.
**
"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 Flamethrowers**
**
A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious
town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy**
In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation
arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is
genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes
in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness
Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest
and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in
Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided
conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes
of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around
Pew's presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes
into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew's story reaches a
shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret
of who they really are--a devil or an angel or something else
entirely--is dwarfed by even larger truths.
Pew, Catherine Lacey's third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and
amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy
morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance.
With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and
boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters' true
selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the
faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
