Purity

More about the book

"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. It takes a seemingly chance encounter with two visitors from Germany to send Pip--and the reader--on a journey of discovery that ranges from Stasi-era East Berlin to a rainforest in Bolivia; and from the ancient war between the sexes to the present-day bewilderments of the Internet. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder--the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time."--Page 4 of cover