Purity | Jonathan Franzen

Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who her father is. This is by no means her only problem: she has college debts, her Oakland office job is a dead end, she loves a married man, and her mother suffocates her with love and secrecy. Pip neither knows where and when she was born, nor does she know her

e her mother's real name and birthday. When one day a German offered her an internship at the "Sunlight Project" of the whistleblower Andreas Wolf, she hoped that he could help her find a father with his internet journalism. She gives her mother a choice: Either she reveals the secret of her origins, or Pip sets off to Bolivia, where Andreas Wolf accomplishes his work of unveiling in the shelter of a heavenly mountain world. And a little later she sets off.

"Innocence", a deep black comedy about youthful idealism, excessive fidelity and the struggle between the sexes, is about guilt in various facets: Andreas Wolf, born in East Berlin as the son of a high-ranking GDR political functionary, has love for a woman committed a crime years ago; an American he met in the turmoil of the fall of the Berlin Wall did not fulfill his wife's desire to have children and then left her; His new partner cannot turn her back on her husband, who is sitting in a wheelchair, and continues to look after him ... In this brilliant American-German social novel by one of the greatest, most linguistically powerful authors of our time, events roll over. And banish the reader to the end.