Pew
One Sunday, a congregation in a small religious town in the American South arrives to find a person asleep on a pew. The stranger will not speak, and no one can tell their age, race, or gender. The townspeople nickname the visitor Pew and pass them from family to family, growing more anxious as the days go on. Unable to sort Pew into any category, the town's certainties begin to crack, and old cruelties rise to the surface. Catherine Lacey's novel is a quiet, unsettling fable about identity, belonging, and the violence underneath a community that prizes order. It was a Library Science pick by Kaia Gerber.
What you might want to know about Pew
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A small Southern town finds a silent, genderless stranger asleep on a church pew, and the community's reaction to a person they cannot categorize reveals what they would rather keep hidden.
Yes. Kaia Gerber selected Pew for her book club Library Science.
Pew was written by Catherine Lacey, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Pew is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Pew takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Pew is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.