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The Radiance

by Ayad Akhtar

An accident opens onto questions of faith, identity, and fracture

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AlbakiReads Editorial

An accident opens onto questions of faith, identity, and fracture

A hit-and-run leaves a writer confronting an experience he cannot distinguish from spiritual awakening or madness. That uncertainty connects the novel’s personal crisis to an investigation involving a campus colleague, an academic scandal, a family secret, and the circumstances surrounding the accident. Moving between rural America and Europe, the story brings Islam and Christianity into conversation with questions of cultural conflict and the metaphysical. Its scope links private entanglements with wider divisions, while asking what might remain after something has been broken.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in literary fiction that examines spiritual questions alongside contemporary cultural conflict.
  • Readers drawn to stories connecting an individual crisis with an investigation, an academic scandal, and a family secret.
  • Readers interested in fiction that engages Islam, Christianity, and settings spanning rural America and Europe.

Themes

Spiritual awakening and uncertaintyCultural and academic conflictFaith and the metaphysicalFamily secrets and personal crisis

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Book overview

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 BadBehavior).


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.
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