The Radiance

About this book

Most Anticipated Books of the Year by Time - Best Books of September by The New York Times and NPR - Best Books of Fall by The Boston Globe - A Must-Read of September by Vulture "Simply put, a work of genius." --Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar's most daring work yet--a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture--"bordering at times on the ineffable" (Mary Gaitskill, bestselling author of Bad Behavior). When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is plunged into a spiritual awakening he can't tell from madness. In its grip, he's drawn to a brilliant campus colleague by an uncanny pull, and into a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator's accident--both the violence and its aftermath. Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it--asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.