First published 2015
Pip Tyler carries $130,000 in student debt and lives with anarchists in Oakland. She knows her real name is Purity, but she doesn't know who her father is or why her reclusive mother lives under a fake name. Their relationship grows more dangerous by the day. A chance meeting with a German peace activist opens an unexpected door. Pip lands an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that collects the world's secrets. She hopes they can reveal her origins. The project belongs to Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who gained fame after the Berlin Wall fell. Now he hides in Bolivia, and he takes an intense interest in Pip for reasons she cannot grasp. Her powerful response to him shatters her ideas about right and wrong. The search for her father becomes something much more complicated and morally ambiguous than she expected.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, activism
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Bolivia, Oakland, South America
Period: 21st Century
563 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: depression, mental-illness