Harrow

(Paperback, Main)

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In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), 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.

'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me ' - New Yorker Books of the Year 2021

'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dali, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' - Observer

Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize

Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award

Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds 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.

Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.

Reviews

'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

'As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams - great virtuoso of the unreal - is one of them.' - Sam Byers

'A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage.' - David L. Ulin

'Harrow's dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author's idiosyncratic stamp ... [there are] glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom.' - The Irish Times

'Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction . . . A crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision . . . To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self.' - Justin Taylor

Author Bio

Joy Williams is the author of four novels and four short story collections. Among her many honours are a National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.