Acclaimed novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen – also infamous for his sexist statements and for saying absolutely cringeworthy things in interviews – is a writer people who like to keep on top of cultural trends are uneasy not to have read.

His latest novel, Purity, follows the life of a young woman named Pip Tyler, who is saddled with college debt and is squatting with a group of anarchists in Oakland, California. She has a troubled relationship with her mother, and doesn’t know who her father is.

Then Pip meets two German men, one of them the charismatic Andreas Wolf, and starts an internship with a Wikileaks-like project, through which she hopes to uncover the identity of her father.