One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.Īs the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next.
The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. One of Vogue's Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2020, one of the Wall Street Journal's Nine Best Books to Read This Spring, one of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of Esquire's 20 Must-Read Books of Summer 2020, one of Vulture's Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2020, one of Refinery29's 25 Books You'll Want to Read This Summer, one of Financial Times' Summer Books of 2020, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020Ī figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy “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
