In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Quick
and the Dead, 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.
**"She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its
environment, Williams's imagination, by remaining true to itself,
reveals new colorations in the ecology around her." --A.O. Scott, The
New York Times Book Review
**
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 "gabby
seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army
of the aged and ill, 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.
