A magnum opus for our morally complex times, from Jonathan Franzen, the New York Times bestselling author of Freedom. 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.