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Harrow by Joy Williams

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Harrow by Joy Williams

In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.
 
"She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams's imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her." --A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl."
 
In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"?
 
Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it.

Joy Williams is the author of novels, short story collections, and Ill Nature, a collection of essays that was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In 2001, her novel The Quick and the Dead was a Pulitzer Prize runner-up. Among her many awards are the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rea Prize for Short Fiction and the Strauss Living Fund. In 2008, she was elected to the Academy. Williams splits his time between Tucson and Laramie, Wyoming.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781984898807
ISBN 10 1984898809
Title Harrow
Author Joy Williams
Series Vintage Contemporaries
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Random House USA Inc
Year published 2022-07-05
Number of pages 224
Prizes Winner of Kirkus Prize for Fiction 2021, Short-listed for Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2022, Short-listed for PEN/Jean Stein Book Award 2022
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.