Clarity: A Novel

The author of the American classic The Things They Carried returns with what may be his finest novel yet, an unconventional love story that unspools over decades and across continents between a Lutheran minister who has lost his faith and a young woman, brilliant and blazingly delinquent, fleeing a traumatic past.

Bought a horse. I’m riding her to South Dakota or Montana or Wyoming or Mars. You were good to me. But watch out for clarity. People who know all the answers are fucking fools.

The minister of Damascus Lutheran Church in St. Paul, MN, Tom Barrie—a former U.S. Army Chaplain Assistant who had deployed to Afghanistan in 2003—is wrestling with a crisis of faith. Ruby Stjern—a pregnant nineteen-year-old, alone in the world, who lives by her considerable wits—seeks Tom’s help in arranging for the unwanted child to be adopted.

When the baby is stillborn, Tom lies to Ruby, telling her the child survived. Tom is haunted by his lie, and becomes obsessed with finding Ruby, who has vanished into the underworld of street life, triggering an odyssey that marks their lives over decades to come.

Forever bonded, the two find freedom in their own ways—Tom through minor keys of commitment and duty; Ruby through her expansive expression of life. As epic as Going After Cacciato and as deeply philosophical as The Things They Carried, Clarity is a return to the grand themes and scope that make Tim O’Brien one of the great writers of our time.