Purity, Jonathan Franzen
Purity, Jonathan Franzen
16 Rating(s)
List: $44.99 | Sale: $31.50
Club: $22.49

Purity
A Novel

Bestseller

Author: Jonathan Franzen

Narrator: Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, Robert Petkoff

Unabridged: 25 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2015


Synopsis

"[Jenna Lamia's, Dylan Baker's, and Robert Petkoff's] performances are uniformly engaging and engrossing; together, they make the listening time fly by." —AudioFile (Earphones Award winner)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book

“So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent” (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from “the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation” (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads

Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists 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 life.

A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip 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 provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.

The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, including Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

About Jenna Lamia

Jenna Lamia is the acclaimed narrator of Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which won a YALSA Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults award, and Carol Lynch Williams's The Chosen One, for which Jenna received the 2010 solo narration (female) Audie Award.   Lamia made her Broadway debut in 1988 in Ah, Wilderness, and she's also appeared off-Broadway in The Glory Of Living, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Her other acting credits include appearances on Oz, Law & Order: SVU, The Jury, and NYPD Blue.  She's also appeared in the films The Fighter, The Box, and Something's Wrong in Kansas.She attended Amherst College, New York University, and the Sorbonne in Paris.

About Dylan Baker

Dylan Baker’s first audiobook recording was for The Grapes of Wrath, which subsequently won both Audie and Earphones Awards.  He has since narrated several audio books, including Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys. In 2002, he won an Audie Award for Abridged Fiction for Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. He has appeared in numerous films including Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Kinsey, Head of State, Thirteen Days, and Happiness.  Baker was nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway performance in La Bete, and he won an Obie Award for his performance in the 1986 play Not About Heroes.  His television credits include guest appearances on The Practice, Law & Order, and The West Wing.  Baker earned his B.F.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale's School of Drama. 

About Robert Petkoff

Robert Petkoff has won multiple AudioFile Earphones awards for his acclaimed narrations. He was named Best Voice of Fiction & Classics for his reading of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. His other narration credits include Oath of Office by Michael Palmer, Gangster Squad by Paul Lieberman, and books by David Foster Wallace.Petkoff has appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in theaters across America and Europe.  He has worked in television and film. His theater credits include Lord Evelyn Oakleigh in the Broadway production of Anything Goes, Perchik as part of the Tony-nomianted cast of Fiddler on the Roof, and Hubert Humphrey in the Tony award-winning play All the Way. He has also had numerous roles in television on shows such as Law and Order and Married with Children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by karen

i don't even know what to say in this review - it's a big book by a big author so there's not going to be any shortage of reviews for it, both on here and in the greater world. but me, i just didn't like it. and that surprised me. the only other book i have read by franzen was The Corrections, and i......more

Goodreads review by Roxane

There is a brilliant novel buried in the some indulgent furious prose that is full of contempt for the reader. I really enjoyed the brilliant novel and wished the indulgence has been excised. Full review on NPR next week.......more

Goodreads review by Glenn

Up till now, I’ve defended Jonathan Franzen. That’s despite his skirmishes with Oprah and Jennifer Weiner, his curmudgeonly comments about social media and his bizarre statement about adopting an Iraqi war or­phan to understand millennials. The author of The Corrections and Freedom can write. Who......more

Goodreads review by Violet

Franzen’s novels now have a recognisable formula. The passing of the narrative baton between several characters who collectively will tell a family history. Some have said this novel is a departure from his familiar familial territory – but I didn’t see that at all. This is another novel about a fam......more


Awards

  • Slate Book Review Best Books of the Year
  • Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide
  • Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
  • Financial Times Books of the Year
  • Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year
  • The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year
  • Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year
  • Seattle Times Best Books of the Year
  • Slate Best Books of the Year
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
  • Washington Post Best Books of the Year
  • NPR Best Book of the Year
  • Amazon.com Best Books of the Year