Harrow

Description

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.

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.

'Praise for Joy Williams: 'One of the great writers of her generation'' - The New York Times 'To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and wonderment ... why we aren't worshipping Joy Williams in public squares is beyond me' - Vanity Fair 'She belongs in the company of Celine and Flannery O'Connor' - James Salter 'Williams is a flawless writer' - NPR 'Deep, dazzling, disconcerting' - Adam Foulds