Catherine Lacey

One of Vogue's Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2020, one of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated Books of 2020, one of Vulture's Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2020, and one of The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the First Half of 2020 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 to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in 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 origins. 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 their true nature—as 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.

A Novel

Clara Gauthier

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. 

I was buried by night. The body is already dead, I thought. I was still smiling. The body is your tomb. 

When the outside is far enough from you, that is when a person can sleep.

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. I’ve received no word from death’s brother.

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

I felt I wasn’t the only one, that there must have been others, that I was part of a “we,” only I didn’t know where they were.

...lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn't end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking and was not alive if not thinking.

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?

How lucky we are to have the moon. It seemed that hardly anyone ever saw the sky anymore. Had we all forgotten it was there? All this time below it, we forget. Maybe the sky will leave us someday, then we will be able to realise what it was.

Resting on that table, not getting undressed, not putting on the paper gown, I feared I'd become something sacrificial, but I would not lay myself on this altar. Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.

Pew quotes

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