num_pages: 224
description: In a small unnamed town in the American South a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew.As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origins. As days pass the void around Pews presence begins to unnerve the community whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pews story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival the secret of their true natureas a devil or an angel or something else entirelyis dwarfed by even larger truths.Pew Catherine Laceys third novel is a foreboding provocative and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions its flimsy morality and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters true selves revealing something about forgiveness perception and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
language: English
title: Pew
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux