Recommendation: Purity is a sweeping tale that seamlessly intertwines a range of characters from different backgrounds, as their stories unfold in landscapes ranging from contemporary society to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Franzen's writing is captivates and deeply inter-textual, taking readers through a twisting plot marked by youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and even murder. This book is ideal for those interested in a thought-provoking mystery with well-crafted characters, and for anyone looking to explore themes of individual identity and how it impacted social relations in the past and present.

Riley is your virtual thrift companion, and here to help you find your next favourite read. You can also ask Riley for recommendations on our Telegram bot here.

• Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2016)
• Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2015)

The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections


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.


Enter the Germans. 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 who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.


Jonathan Franzen's Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.