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The Radiance
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Overview
A NEW YORK TIMES NOVEL EVERYONE WILL BE TALKING ABOUT IN 2026 - A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 "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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781668078631
- ISBN-10: 1668078635
- Publisher: S&s/Summit Books
- Publish Date: September 2026
- Dimensions: 9.11 x 5.91 x 1.21 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.05 pounds
- Page Count: 304
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In The Radiance, Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Disgraced and author of Homeland Elegies, has written a novel that’s bound to inspire plenty of conversation and musing.
From the start, it’s apparent that The Radiance will be multilayered, self-reflective and cerebral. The novel follows a writer—also named Ayad Akhtar—who is subletting a home in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2020, while working on a book. Early on, Ayad is the victim of a hit-and-run accident while on a bike ride. The accident leaves him briefly in a coma and requires a splenectomy. Once home from the hospital, he begins to notice a number of increasingly strange feelings—as though he is “seeing not with my eyes, but through my chest.” He experiences an aura, a sort of inexplicable radiance. His libido is mysteriously gone, but he enjoys the new sensations in a different way. Over time, they change, and eventually he begins to feel as though the left side of his body doesn’t belong to him.
Ayad tries to describe what’s occurring to his friend and neighbor, Lucie, although words fail to convey his rapture. Lucie helps care for Ayad and also arranges for him to teach a creative writing course on autofiction at a nearby college. A professor, she is the author of a well-known, controversial essay about an affair she had with her own married professor while she was a student decades prior. When Ayad begins teaching, he asks students to “use their lives to create stories about themselves” that aren’t real, and as they share their work, all hell breaks loose. For instance, he realizes—rather awkwardly—that one gifted but troubled student, Susan Yi, is writing about her own relationship with Lucie and Lucie’s husband, Stanford.
Akhtar manages to weave these somewhat disparate strands together, writing a thought-provoking metaphysical novel. Readers will be enthralled with the mystery of the bike accident and its bizarre repercussions. A down-to-earth police investigator, Billie, provides a nice counterpoint to the intellectual aspects of the story, leading Ayad to eventually confront the hit-and-run driver. Meanwhile, the classroom scenes manage to be absurdly entertaining while also providing an insightful look at the complexities of navigating higher education in today’s social climate. Scenes with Ayad’s therapist are informative and thematically unifying as Ayad wrestles with these myriad complexities.
Like Ayad’s odd malady, The Radiance is strangely enlightening.
In The Radiance, Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Disgraced and author of Homeland Elegies, has written a novel that’s bound to inspire plenty of conversation and musing.
From the start, it’s apparent that The Radiance will be multilayered, self-reflective and cerebral. The novel follows a writer—also named Ayad Akhtar—who is subletting a home in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2020, while working on a book. Early on, Ayad is the victim of a hit-and-run accident while on a bike ride. The accident leaves him briefly in a coma and requires a splenectomy. Once home from the hospital, he begins to notice a number of increasingly strange feelings—as though he is “seeing not with my eyes, but through my chest.” He experiences an aura, a sort of inexplicable radiance. His libido is mysteriously gone, but he enjoys the new sensations in a different way. Over time, they change, and eventually he begins to feel as though the left side of his body doesn’t belong to him.
Ayad tries to describe what’s occurring to his friend and neighbor, Lucie, although words fail to convey his rapture. Lucie helps care for Ayad and also arranges for him to teach a creative writing course on autofiction at a nearby college. A professor, she is the author of a well-known, controversial essay about an affair she had with her own married professor while she was a student decades prior. When Ayad begins teaching, he asks students to “use their lives to create stories about themselves” that aren’t real, and as they share their work, all hell breaks loose. For instance, he realizes—rather awkwardly—that one gifted but troubled student, Susan Yi, is writing about her own relationship with Lucie and Lucie’s husband, Stanford.
Akhtar manages to weave these somewhat disparate strands together, writing a thought-provoking metaphysical novel. Readers will be enthralled with the mystery of the bike accident and its bizarre repercussions. A down-to-earth police investigator, Billie, provides a nice counterpoint to the intellectual aspects of the story, leading Ayad to eventually confront the hit-and-run driver. Meanwhile, the classroom scenes manage to be absurdly entertaining while also providing an insightful look at the complexities of navigating higher education in today’s social climate. Scenes with Ayad’s therapist are informative and thematically unifying as Ayad wrestles with these myriad complexities.
Like Ayad’s odd malady, The Radiance is strangely enlightening.