Harrow

Summary

In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.

Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award

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.
“One of America's greatest living writers…Williams's work is beautiful, bewildering.” FINANCIAL TIMES
“One of the great writers of her generation.” NEW YORK TIMES
“When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me.” NEW YORKER, Books of the Year 2021

“A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage.” DAVID L. ULIN ? Los Angeles Times


“A blackly comic portrait of futility . . . This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis.” SAM SACKS ? WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Cracked, morbidly hilarious ... a splintered vision of environmental collapse that seems somehow both gleefully nihilistic and yearningly spiritual.” WALL STREET JOURNAL Top Ten Books of 2021