The Radiance: A Novel

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.