February Bookclub
Can you believe it is time to pick a February book already! Thank you so much to those who are joining in. Those texts, instagram messages, late night whastaps really make my heart full. I really appreciate your effort reading along and all the kind words you send. I’m not an influencer or someone with any kind of online presence so although sometimes it feels like I’m just talking into a void having people engaging tell me how much they are loving (or hating) the month’s pick honestly brings me so much joy!
I have been so indecisive in what to choose for this month, hence the slightly late notice post! I’ve decided to stick to my bookshelf (Kindle in this case) and read something that has been sat on my TBR desperate to pick up.
Sticking to my bookshelf and continuing to read books that aren’t sparkling new releases. This month I have chosen Pew by Catherine Lacey.
A bit about the book -
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 Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of their true nature—as a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.
Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: it’s contradictions, it’s 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 categorise human complexity.
A bit about the author -
Catherine Lacey is the author of four novels: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, as well as a story collection, Certain American States.
Pages in book - 224
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