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Pew: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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.
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"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
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“An ambitious story of compassion, cruelty, and belonging, as well as a powerful exploration of the dangers posed by white guilt and institutionalized religion.”
— Esquire -
“I began to see Pew as an incarnation of the town’s purged memories―a passive, shapeless presence loaded with a million projected meanings that, much like this book, you could spend a lifetime decoding.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Pew is a masterpiece of misdirection…This is a novel about preconception, moral blindness and the long fingers of guilt.”
— The Scotsman -
"[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
Awards
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A USA Today Pick of the Week
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Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
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Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
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A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
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An Amazon Best Books of the Year Pick
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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About Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere
About Bahni Turpin
Bahni Turpin, winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and several prestigious Audie Awards for her narrations, was named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine in 2019. Publishers Weekly magazine named her Narrator of the Year for 2016. She is an ensemble member of the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. She has guest starred in many television series, including NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Six Feet Under, Cold Case, What about Brian, and The Comeback. Film credits include Brokedown Palace, Crossroads, and Daughters of the Dust. She is also a member of the recording cast of The Help, which won numerous awards.