Give a gift that speaks volumes! SHOP GIFTS

Purity: A Novel


Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
17
Narrator
8
Release Date
September 1, 2015
Duration
25 hours 0 minutes
Summary
'[Jenna Lamia's, Dylan Baker's, and Robert Petkoff's] performances are uniformly engaging and engrossing; together, they make the listening time fly by.' —AudioFile (Earphones Award winner)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book

“So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent” (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from “the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation” (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads

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.

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. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.

The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Reviews
Profile Avatar
Nora J.

Could have been a good story but the characters fall flat. Every one of them is ripped from a painful - and uninteresting - stereotype. Attempt to sympathize with sexual predators. No thanks.

Profile Avatar
John C.

After having read two other Franzen Novels, I looked forward to reading Purity. Unfortunately I found it to be too long, the plot and subplots often dull, and the characters hardly believable.

Profile Avatar
Will Hunt

A good book - but not an altogether completed piece. Jenna Lamia does an excellent job narrating the role of Kip, but I can't help but feel that Dylan Baker doesn't come off well when he reads the part for Andreas- but that may also be because I find the character itself immensely irritating. There is some dialogue that is, as one critic said, 'clearly only the way writers think that ordinary people talk,' but I thought the book read well as a whole - right up until the ending, which felt rushed and unworthy of everything else which came before it. I don't know if an author has ever failed a character quiet the way Franzen fails Annabelle. In the end, it feels like the author just wanted to be done with the project.

Profile Avatar
Lynn Detwiler

Oh the webs we weave. Long at times. Often unlikely. But thoroughly enjoyed.

Profile Avatar
Carol Morris

It's a great Book and story about secrets, lies, mother-love or lack of and what makes people commit crime etc. The story is at times too long but it is filled with masterpieces of writing and interesting facts/fantasy. It haven't read his previous books but I will.

1 book added to cart
Subtotal
$44.99
View Cart