Pew

A Novel

De: Catherine Lacey

Narrado por: Bahni Turpin

2021 Audie Award Nominee for Best Literary Fiction & Classics Audiobook

Longlisted for the 2021 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.

©2020 Catherine Lacey (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Narrator Bahni Turpin gives a tour-de-force performance in this strange allegory featuring a nondescript person found sleeping on a church pew in a small, unnamed Southern town.… Turpin's extraordinary range includes everyone from small children to older men and women. In one scene involving the mysterious annual Forgiveness Festival, Turpin switches age and gender with the ease of water slipping through one's fingers. PEW is a strange ride, but trust Turpin to steer the ship." --AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award Winner

"[Bahni] Turpin narrates with a newscaster-like calm in the first person thoughts of the titular character - a mysterious child, somewhat ambiguous in gender and race.… A provocative meditation on the duplicity of appearances, strongly voiced." --Booklist, starred review

Masterpiece

I think that it was a masterpiece of postmodern fiction. I think that it has not found its audience yet. I passionately loved this book and keep thinking about it a lot.

What. Was. That?!

Pew tells you a lot about yourself. Does Pew tell you about themselves? Well, you have to listen.

Strange and captivating

A very unique story that was at times infuriating and then beautiful, frustrating and then insightful. Exquisite narration as always from Bahni Turpin.

Originality, Calm, soothing narration

Enjoyed the different perspectives of the book. The slow, calm narrative. Very different original storyline.

Not What I Hoped For...

This book just wasn't great. It was reviewed as almost heartwarming and soul changing but I, unfortunately, wasn't moved at all. Almost bored. I was really looking forward to this, too.