New Franzen novel set for September 2015 release

Fourth Estate will publish a new novel by Jonathan Franzen next year, titled Purity.

The HarperCollins imprint confirmed it would publish simultaneously with US publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which plans to release Purity in September next year.

Nicholas Pearson, publishing director at Fourth Estate, described the book as "something new and bold".

"At its heart, Purity is the story of a young woman searching for the father she has never met, a journey that brings her into the orbit of an outlaw-hero of the internet," Pearson said. "It’s a book about secrets: both state and corporate secrets, and the power of secrets within families, how they connect us to others and how they affect our emotional lives. Set in America, East Germany at the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bolivia, it’s an expansive, multigenerational page-turner."

He added: "As he did in The Corrections and Freedom, Jonathan gives us characters we truly believe in and whose lives we become completely absorbed in. This time the story is told in a slightly different register to its predecessors – a realistic novel with a faint dreamlike texture. For me it is something new and bold and very thrilling."

Franzen's last novel, Freedom, was released in 2010. It hit headlines in the UK after the original print run featured typesetter's errors, with HarperCollins offering replacement copies for people who bought the original.

Fourth Estate released Franzen's last book, a translation and critical appraisal of the German essayist Karl Kraus called The Kraus Project, in October last year.