https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/26/pew-by-catherine-lacey-review-when-silence-speaks-volumes

A mute stranger of indeterminate gender arouses suspicion in a Christian community in this powerful exploration of identity politics

Pitched somewhere between Shirley Jackson’s creepy small-town horror and the seminar-room riddling of JM Coetzee, Catherine Lacey’s powerful new novel unfolds in a sinister US Bible belt community shaken by the arrival of a mute amnesiac vagrant whose age, sex and race aren’t clear. “I’m having trouble lately with remembering,” the narrator tells us on the first page – something of an understatement, it turns out.

Taken variously as a child or young adult, he or she (the novel is agnostic about the value of such labels) is found asleep in a church, unwilling or unable to answer questions about how they ended up there. Given shelter by a family of five – and named, like a dog, after the place it was found – the new lodger soon causes resentment among the children displaced as a consequence. “He oughta be in the back in there, one of them that picks up the dishes,” one son says, giving up his attic room. “It ain’t no boy,” says another: “She ain’t even black neither. Don’t know what she is...”

The novel’s glassy cadences and lack of speech marks heighten our sense of the narrator’s alienation