The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections Youn g Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, tha t she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchi sts in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal lif e. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads P ip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateu r who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on th e lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, an d the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right an d wrong. Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extre me fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters – Californians and East Germans, good par ents and bad parents, journalists and leakers – and he follows their intertwinin g paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as an cient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating bo ok yet by one of the major writers of our time.