INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER THRUST IS: “Epic.” –The New York Times “A triumph.” —Elle “Stunningly beautiful.” —The Daily Beast “Both of the moment and utterly timeless.” —Chicago Review of Books “A book to take in wide-eyed.” —Rebecca Makkai NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST As rising waters—and an encroaching police state—endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a "carrier" travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins—vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisvė, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisvė must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives—and their shared dream of freedom. A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust will leave no reader unchanged. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780525534914 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 06-27-2023 Pages: 352 Product Dimensions: 5.12(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.84(d)About the Author Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora: A Headcase, the story collection Verge, and the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt Cruces 1 We dreamed we were hers. The body of us thought that, because we built her, we belonged to her. We built her in pieces from our bodies, from the stories we held and the stories before that and the stories that might come. She arrived by boat in pieces. When the ship Isre finally reached port, we wept. The sailors too. They had been convinced that the tempests they'd endured on board would drown them in the ocean, and the cargo with them. The deck of the ship was nearly a farmer's field in size. The hold had been covered with huge black tarps for the journey. When the sailors pulled the tarps back, the hold looked dark and foreboding. I was asked to jump into that dark. Like plunging into the ocean's deep. Down in the hold, my eyes began to adjust. Gigantic crates the size of houses filled with pieces of the colossus: a woman in slices, crated and shipped. One by one, we found her body parts. Hair. Nose. Crown. Eyes. Mouth. Fingers, hand. Foot. Torch. She had arrived, in pieces of herself. Later, while discussing her reassemblage, an engineer remarked that the "embryo lighthouse," as they called the interior skeleton of the statue, held clues to reconstructing her form. Yet many elements of her construction went unexplained, left us puzzled. We were left with our imaginations to create adaptations. During those months, we lived in the city and we labored on the island. We were woodworkers, ironworkers, roofers and plasterers and brick masons. We were pipe fitters and welders and carpenters. We mixed concrete, we pounded earth, we armed the saws and drills. We were sheet metal and copper specialists. She arrived in our hands as thirty-one tons of copper and one hundred and twenty-five tons of steel. Three hundred copper sheets had been pressed to create the outer skin of her. We were cooks and cleaners and nuns and night watchpeople. We were nurses and artists and janitors, runners and messengers and thieves. Mothers and fathers and grandparents, sisters and brothers and children. During the day you could always hear the insistent hammering, the files grating, the chains clanking, the copper singing as it was being shaped over wooden scaffolds, the cacophonous orchestra of our labor. You could always see arms swinging, hands at work, shoulders and biceps and the jaws of the workers flexing and grinding. Those sounds were our bodies. Her body coming to life from all of our hands. We the body took pride in our labor-as if we expected that someone would know our names, carry our stories. When the winds in the harbor grew too strong, we had to abandon scaffolding. We used pulleys and ropes. We took care to be gentle against the softer metal. We dangled ourselves around her body, swung around the pieces of her, like the swoop and lift of acrobats, or birds, or window washers-though all of us were tethered to her body. Sometimes, for just a moment, a body can feel real inside a story that way. As if each of us existed. At night, when it was no body's shift, some of us would stand around her head and stare at her giant rounded eyes. We thought she looked sad. Or angry and sad. Her eyes each much larger than a human head. Her face neither male nor female, or perhaps just both. We felt she had the stare of our labor but also our loss, our love, our lives. Sometimes, holding near to her, we thought or felt mother, but we meant it in some new way no one has imagined before. We were the impossible possible voice of bodies. Some of us were born here and some of us were the sons and daughters of mothers and fathers not from here. They came from famine they came from poverty they came from occupations and brutalities and war. They came from something to leave, which is why they crossed land and water. They spoke of persecutions or poverty, but they also spoke of rolling hills or sunsets over the desert or flowers with names that made our hearts reach out. The leaving of a place carried sorrow as well as relief, and the coming here carried both as well. We spoke of both brutality and beauty-or remembered beauty-in our homelands, or in the hands of infants born here. We let go the hand of prior homes to reach this place. We were Jews and Italians and Lithuanians and Poles. We were Irish and Native American and Chinese. We were Lebanese and African and Mexican. We were Germans and Trinidadians and Scots. There were hundreds of us over time and across distances; it is impossible to say how many. We were an ocean of laborers. We spoke Russian and French and Italian and English and Chinese and Irish and Yiddish, Swahili and Lakota and Spanish and a swirl of dialects. Our languages a kind of anthem. We understood that labor crossed oceans. Some of us unloaded the statue pieces after her oceanic journey and some of us reassembled the pieces. Those of us who had unloaded pieces, and then reassembled them, felt a strange connection. Toward one another and toward her. Or we might have. The sum of us-the we that might have been-could have understood from the passing around of stories that our French colaborers meant for her to commemorate the abolition of slavery. The French sculptor's early model had held a broken chain in her left hand. Our eyes saw the drawings. The model. We knew what the chain meant. Some of us might have rubbed our wrists or ankles or necks at the thought or memory of it. But then the chain moved. On her body, and on our bodies. Down near her foot. We might have known then, in our bodies, that our states were stitched imperfectly-that war had ripped open a forever wound. That some of us would not be fully counted, our rights still pounded down on a daily basis. That children were being ground into dust everywhere, in the factories. That laws were excluding us even as we the body built the means of transportation across the land. Stories were traveling between us that could have led anywhere, turned in any direction, in spite of our backbreaking work. That we could have been born from her, but small cracks began to appear in the story, just as in the materials of her body and our labor. Instead of a broken chain, she held a tablet. The tablet signified the rule of law. The broken chain and shackle were moved to the ground, all but hidden under her feet. You could barely see them, but we knew they were there-our labor had put them there-and we had thoughts about it. We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden. We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don't speak. A fear slid through some of our necks-that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers-but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings. Once, when we were working on the head and the face at ground level, I saw a suffragist from a protest march spit on the face of her as we worked. Why should a female face represent freedom when women cannot yet vote, she asked. She shook as she yelled, as her question streaked down the hard copper cheek. I thought about that streak for a very long time. After everyone was gone for the night, I took a rag to the copper there, crying briefly as I wiped it away. The suffragist was right. I saw her meaning. But I had been among those who'd worked to make that statue's face, worked so that it could hold both the gravitas and the tenderness of an idea that I believed could be beautiful. In some future-not ours, but some day to come. A face that might become something we were not yet. A freedom obscured in the shackles hidden beneath her feet, r