The recipient of much acclaim for works like ‘State of Grace’ in 1973 (which was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction) and ‘The Quick and the Dead’ in 2002 (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), the remarkable septuagenarian author Joy Williams is going to release a book this year. The novel is her fifth one altogether and the first since ‘The Quick and the Dead’ to be specific; Williams’ most recent book, the story collection ‘The Visiting Privilege’, was published in 2015.

The novel, titled ‘Harrow’, is slated for publication on September 14^th by Knopf. And the publisher’s description is as follows:

Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at 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. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “baggy seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons–against all reasonableness–to try and recover something of it.

Such a tale is certainly something to look forward to!

(Article extracted from The Literary Hub with revisions to the headline and text by Sakshi Selvanathan)