Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel Purity, which tells the story of a young woman searching for her father, is due for release next September.
Purity Tyler– more affectionately called Pip - moves in time periods from contemporary America to South America and East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“The story hinges on the mystery of Pip’s family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower,” Jonathan Galassi, president of the publishing firm, Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s told The New York Times.
The book will be published in September 2015, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and by Fourth Estate, part of Harper Collins, in Ireland and the UK. Galassi also declared that Purity will be a “stylistic departure” for Franzen. “There’s a kind of fabulist quality to it, it’s not strict realism. There’s a kind of mythic undertone to the story.”
“At its heart, Purity is the story of a young woman searching for the father she has never met,” said Nicholas Pearson, Franzen’s editor at Fourth Estate. Pearson revealed that the journey “brings her into the orbit of an outlaw-hero of the internet”.
Franzen's previous novels also include The Corrections - like Freedom, a mega-seller, in many languages - Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh City. A new biography of the writer is also in the offing.
