Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE

Tara Isabella Burton

A powerful, eerie novel by Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature. It is a coming-of-age novel about desire, religious zealotry, and the hunger for transcendence among the devoted members of a cultic chapel choir in a prestigious Maine boarding school -- and the obsessively ambitious, terrifyingly charismatic girl that rules over them.

When the shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic St. Dunstan's alum Sebastian Webster, who died at 19, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school's cultic chapel choir: presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss, who is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn.

Virginia inducts Laura into a world of transcendent music and arcane ritual, illicit cliff-diving and midnight crypt visits: a world that, like Webster's novels, finally seems to Laura to be full of meaning. But when a new, reformist school chaplain challenges Virginia's hold on the "family" she has created, and Virginia's efforts to hold onto her power become increasingly destructive, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go.

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Book Published 2022-03-01 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Tara Isabella Burton is both one of our sharpest writers of witty, propulsive fiction and one of our most profound thinkers on the 21st Century's search for religious meaning. With The World Cannot Give, she has united her talents and written a fun, serious, surprising, necessary novel about the twin adolescent thirsts for sexual experimentation and "World-Historical" importance, and the way those thirsts shape and thwart each other. Calling to mind the work of writers such as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Donna Tartt, The World Cannot Give gives and gives and gives.

Burton writes with a heart-stopping understanding of the micro-dynamics among adolescents still uncentered at their cores. The insular campus setting and small scenes in crypts, libraries, and dorm rooms that contain big emotions and powerful dialogue will make readers cringe at what they can see coming.

I devoured this book in a single rapturous day, and finished it with the eerie satisfied sense that it had been written specifically for me, or someone like me. I have spent my life as a reader hunting for those books that hit every mark: gorgeous sentences, enthralling plot design, characters that I am wedded to or haunted by long after the book ends, a sense of the erotic that is as queer as it is and insistent and hypnotic, and a keyhole view of some cultish sect of social life that I don't want to join, but to which I want a front row seat. I simply cannot recommend this novel highly enough. It is, I think, a perfect book.

Burton touches upon all the best parts of dark academia.She digs deep into the darkest corners of the human psyche to pose several poignant, thought-provoking questions about devotion, power, repression and the obsession of youth..If there is a writer better suited than Tara Isabella Burton to join the ranks of Donna Tartt, I certainly cannot think of one. She is not only a gorgeous prose writer, but also a brave one who, even when she makes you uncomfortable, is always pushing the envelope.

THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE is the perfect book for anyone who loves A SEPARATE PEACE, anyone who hates A SEPARATE PEACE and anyone who has never read A SEPARATE PEACE. It is at once wonderfully old-fashioned yet thrillingly modern, rich in setting and character, specific and universal. In short: I loved it.

This new novel from the author of Social Creature plunges readers into a vortex of dark academia and queer desire.

A finely drawn portrait of mystic passion and fevered yearning, THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE will keep you up long into the strange, dark, thrilling night.

The Secret History meets The Price of Salt.

I love this book. Tara Isabella Burton writes beautifully about beauty, and about transcendence and longing and desire. Her characters are so vibrantly alive, so searching, so raw, so foolish and so profound. Wonderful from start to finish.

A defiantly distinct meditation on power, desire, and the search for self. Events unfold from Laura's perspective via an increasingly breathless third-person-present narrative, conferring voyeuristic intimacy. Deftly drawn, deeply insecure characters complement the melodramatic plot, which crescendos to a devastating close.

The movie adaptation is underway from Fable, with Tara potentially writing the screenplay.

Tara Isabella Burton harnesses the fresh desire of teenage-dom in this story of a boarding school on the coast of Maine: A charismatic, devout, and sexually ambiguous young choir member manipulates her acolytesto fatal ends.