Jonathan Franzen coming to Kansas City in September

Novelist Jonathan Franzen (Freedom, The Corrections) has a new book coming out September 1. It’s called Purity, and it’s about, well, here is what it is about, from publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 

“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.”

Franzen (a St. Louis native) will be stopping in Kansas City as part of the book tour. He’ll be at Unity Temple on the Plaza (707 West 47th Street) on Wednesday, September 16, at 7 p.m. He’ll discuss Purity, answer audience questions and sign books. The purchase of Purity at Rainy Day Books gets you in the door. More info here.