Altar / Pew

GANADORA DEL YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD, FINALISTA DEL PREMIO DYLAN THOMAS, Y UNA DE LAS MEJORES NOVELAS DEL AO SEGN VARIOS MEDIOS

Una obra magistral, su mejor libro hasta la fecha. Publishers Weekly

Maravillosa, bellsimamente escrita […], con una atmsfera inquietante […]. No puedo dejar de insistir en lo dulce, lo gil y lo entretenida que es esta novela. Lionel Shriver, Financial Times

Una persona llega a un pequeo pueblo de Estados Unidos. Las gentes del lugar la encuentran durmiendo en un banco de la iglesia, donde se ha refugiado durante la noche. Es imposible discernir su raza, su edad o su sexo y, aunque entiende el idioma en el que le hablan, se niega a pronunciar palabra o a contar su historia. La comunidad local, unida por una fuerte fe religiosa, se muestra dispuesta a acogerla y le da el nombre de Altar, pero en los seis das siguientes, previos al misterioso Festival del Perdn, su presencia acaba exponiendo los miedos ms profundos y las hipocresas de la congregacin.

Lacey ha creado una fbula hipntica que nos plantea preguntas urgentes sobre nuestra identidad, nuestro cuerpo y nuestra capacidad de entendimiento: una novela perturbadora y esencial.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Fiction 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

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, Catherine Laceys 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.