The World Cannot Give

The World Cannot Give is about longing and desire, the kind you feel so deeply that it makes your soul ache. For Laura, these emotions are painfully apparent in her obsession with famous author Webster. When she arrives at his old boarding school, her devotion shifts to fellow student Virginia Strauss. Virginia wants to be "world historical" like Webster was. Laura is willing to do anything to help her achieve that. I recommend this for anyone who enjoys dark academia, queer longing, or who understands the torment of being a teenage girl. Recommended By Charlotte S., Powells.com

The Girls meets Fight Club in this coming-of-age novel about queer 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 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 "prep school prophet" (and St. Dunstan's alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, 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 chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn. She expects nothing short of perfection from herself — and from the members of the choir.

Virginia inducts the besotted 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 school chaplain challenges Virginia's hold on the "family" she has created, and Virginia's efforts to wield her power become increasingly dangerous, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go.

The World Cannot Give is a shocking meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world.

"A defiantly distinct meditation on power, desire, and the search for self…Deftly drawn, deeply insecure characters complement the melodramatic plot, which crescendos to a devastating close." Kirkus (Starred Review)

"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." Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of Lady in the Lake

"Tara Isabella Burton has consistently revealed herself to be one of this country's most interesting writers. There is almost nothing she sets her pen to that isn't page-turningly fascinating. She roots around the dark corners of the human psyche, writing astutely about the dangers of repression and the psychological and physical violence it often breeds. The World Cannot Give was as unexpected as it was riveting." Attica Locke, author of Heaven, My Home and Bluebird, Bluebird

"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." Melissa Febos, Nationally bestselling author of Girlhood and Whip Smart

"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." David Burr Gerrard , author of The Epiphany Machine

"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." Phil Klay , author of Missionaries and Redeployment

"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." Elisabeth Thomas , author of Catherine House

Watch the Powell’s virtual event with Tara Isabella Burton and David Burr Gerrard!

Tara Isabella Burton's debut novel, Social Creature, was named a "best book of the year" by The New York Times, Vulture, and The Guardian. She has written on religion, culture, and place for The New York Times, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, City Journal, The Economist's 1843, Aeon, The BBC, The Atlantic, Salon, The New Statesman, and The Telegraph. She is a columnist at Religion News Service, a contributing editor at American Purpose, and the former staff religion writer at Vox. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Volume 1 Brooklyn, The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, Tor, PANK, and more. She received a doctorate in theology from Trinity College, Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, in 2017.