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The Radiance: A Novel
A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar's most daring work yet — a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture. When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator's accident—both the violence and its aftermath. Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it — asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.
304 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 29, 2026
About the author
Ayad Akhtar
19 books1,064 followersAyad Akhtar is a playwright, novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at PEN/America and New York Theatre Workshop.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 186 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3.5 stars:
Thank you Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the ARC of The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar. Expected publication date is September 29, 2026.
THE RADIANCE is one of those novels that makes me wonder whether the book is too highbrow for me, or whether I simply don't have the patience for a novel that works this hard to prove how intellectual it is. Maybe a little of both. It took me three weeks to finish this book, which is an eternity for me!
At the center of the novel is Ayad, a complicated and often fascinating character who defines himself as a "non-Muslim Muslim." I found this aspect of his identity particularly interesting, especially as he considers what it means to belong culturally and historically to a faith without actually believing in it. The novel is filled with these kinds of questions about identity, religion, family, literature, psychology, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
There is actually quite a lot happening. Ayad works with a local police detective to track down the hit-and-run driver who left him for dead on a deserted road. His cousin reveals shocking secrets about their family. Ayad begins treatment with a brilliant psychiatrist who tries to get to the bottom of his increasingly bizarre symptoms. And he becomes involved with a local literature professor whose relationship with an unstable student precipitates a huge scandal.
All of this should have kept me turning the pages, but THE RADIANCE is much more interested in ideas than in plot. Akhtar's style is overtly intellectual, densely layered with literary, philosophical, religious, and psychological references. He also has a fondness for footnotes, sometimes half-burying a provocative idea in a footnote that the main narrative apparently cannot quite contain. Occasionally I found these fascinating. Other times I wanted to say, "Could we please just get back to the story?"
One of my favorite moments involves Dostoyevsky's descriptions in THE IDIOT of the ecstatic experiences associated with epilepsy. Ayad's willingness to contemplate epilepsy as an explanation for his impotence struck me as unexpectedly funny amid all the intellectual seriousness. Those moments when Akhtar allowed some humor to puncture the weightiness of the novel worked particularly well for me.
There is much here to admire, and I suspect readers who enjoy highly cerebral, philosophical fiction will find far more to savor than I did. I appreciated the exploration of Ayad's Muslim identity, the psychological elements, and some of the wonderfully strange connections the novel makes. But I also frequently felt as though I were standing outside the novel looking in, aware that there were layers and references I wasn't fully appreciating.
Perhaps THE RADIANCE was simply too highbrow for me. Or perhaps I prefer my intellectual explorations woven a little more seamlessly into the story rather than tucked into footnotes and densely layered digressions. Either way, three weeks later, I made it to the end! And despite my frustrations, I'm still thinking about Ayad and some of the ideas Akhtar raised, which certainly says something about the novel.
Thank you Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the ARC of The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar. Expected publication date is September 29, 2026.
THE RADIANCE is one of those novels that makes me wonder whether the book is too highbrow for me, or whether I simply don't have the patience for a novel that works this hard to prove how intellectual it is. Maybe a little of both. It took me three weeks to finish this book, which is an eternity for me!
At the center of the novel is Ayad, a complicated and often fascinating character who defines himself as a "non-Muslim Muslim." I found this aspect of his identity particularly interesting, especially as he considers what it means to belong culturally and historically to a faith without actually believing in it. The novel is filled with these kinds of questions about identity, religion, family, literature, psychology, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
There is actually quite a lot happening. Ayad works with a local police detective to track down the hit-and-run driver who left him for dead on a deserted road. His cousin reveals shocking secrets about their family. Ayad begins treatment with a brilliant psychiatrist who tries to get to the bottom of his increasingly bizarre symptoms. And he becomes involved with a local literature professor whose relationship with an unstable student precipitates a huge scandal.
All of this should have kept me turning the pages, but THE RADIANCE is much more interested in ideas than in plot. Akhtar's style is overtly intellectual, densely layered with literary, philosophical, religious, and psychological references. He also has a fondness for footnotes, sometimes half-burying a provocative idea in a footnote that the main narrative apparently cannot quite contain. Occasionally I found these fascinating. Other times I wanted to say, "Could we please just get back to the story?"
One of my favorite moments involves Dostoyevsky's descriptions in THE IDIOT of the ecstatic experiences associated with epilepsy. Ayad's willingness to contemplate epilepsy as an explanation for his impotence struck me as unexpectedly funny amid all the intellectual seriousness. Those moments when Akhtar allowed some humor to puncture the weightiness of the novel worked particularly well for me.
There is much here to admire, and I suspect readers who enjoy highly cerebral, philosophical fiction will find far more to savor than I did. I appreciated the exploration of Ayad's Muslim identity, the psychological elements, and some of the wonderfully strange connections the novel makes. But I also frequently felt as though I were standing outside the novel looking in, aware that there were layers and references I wasn't fully appreciating.
Perhaps THE RADIANCE was simply too highbrow for me. Or perhaps I prefer my intellectual explorations woven a little more seamlessly into the story rather than tucked into footnotes and densely layered digressions. Either way, three weeks later, I made it to the end! And despite my frustrations, I'm still thinking about Ayad and some of the ideas Akhtar raised, which certainly says something about the novel.
March 27, 2026
Thanks to Cam via Simon & Schuster for this advanced reader copy of Ayad Akhtar's new novel dropping in fall of 2026.
After reading, and loving, Akhtar's 2020 novel Homeland Elegies I was utterly delighted to find a copy of The Radiance in the mail. I think it's worth mentioning at the top that this novel does reference his last in a fashion that is additive having read both books. If you're considering this novel later in the year, I'd say you'd be smart to give Homeland Elegies a read first.
Like Homeland Elegies, The Radiance brings the reader the autofictional life of Ayad Akhtar. What's real and what's fiction is blurry at best and the novel's strongest passages feel like reading someone's diary. In the novel's opening pages Akhtar is struck in a hit and run while out for a bike ride that leaves him without a spleen. During the acute care of his injury and his subsequent convalescence, Akhtar is unmoored from his worry-ridden frame and left with a constellation of strange neurological symptoms. Akhtar's journey through his expanding empathy, absent anxiety, and search for understanding of his experience forms the spine of The Radiance.
From there, the novel moves in a number of different directions. There's a subplot that seeks to understand the hit and run and uncover the perpetrator while a second recurring topic is a family trauma Akhtar becomes aware of after a dinner with his cousin. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a professor at an upscale university with whom Akhtar becomes intellectually and, potentially, romantically entangled. This professor convinces our narrator to teach a creative writing course at the university where his students then become involved in the larger narrative.
It's to Akhtar's credit that this giant, messy story feels so vital and true to life and not a hodgepodge of topics. There's an oneiric quality to the writing, themes, and conflicts that occur over a compact 300 pages. Even if the connection feels at first tenuous, Akhtar leaves subtle and overt ties between the subjects here creating a web of experience rather than a simple point A to point B plot. I know this is not going to be for everyone, but it worked exceedingly well for me.
This is in no small part due to Akhtar's splendid--dare I say radiant--writing. There's a flow here that many writers aspire to but few achieve. Shifting between the insular and incredibly personal to huge cultural and societal changes at institutions of higher learning shouldn't be as smooth as Akhtar makes it here. Akhtar's internal experience could have read like an extended micro-dose mushroom trip, but instead feels expansive and strives towards a larger understanding of human experience.
Like a stew's component parts before being cooked, The Radiance looks like it shouldn't all go together, but once you've had a proper taste, it's richness and complexity unveils itself. I loved reading this book and came away, as I did with Homeland Elegies, feeling smarter and in awe of what can still surprise in literature. This is really great stuff.
[4.5 Stars]
After reading, and loving, Akhtar's 2020 novel Homeland Elegies I was utterly delighted to find a copy of The Radiance in the mail. I think it's worth mentioning at the top that this novel does reference his last in a fashion that is additive having read both books. If you're considering this novel later in the year, I'd say you'd be smart to give Homeland Elegies a read first.
Like Homeland Elegies, The Radiance brings the reader the autofictional life of Ayad Akhtar. What's real and what's fiction is blurry at best and the novel's strongest passages feel like reading someone's diary. In the novel's opening pages Akhtar is struck in a hit and run while out for a bike ride that leaves him without a spleen. During the acute care of his injury and his subsequent convalescence, Akhtar is unmoored from his worry-ridden frame and left with a constellation of strange neurological symptoms. Akhtar's journey through his expanding empathy, absent anxiety, and search for understanding of his experience forms the spine of The Radiance.
From there, the novel moves in a number of different directions. There's a subplot that seeks to understand the hit and run and uncover the perpetrator while a second recurring topic is a family trauma Akhtar becomes aware of after a dinner with his cousin. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a professor at an upscale university with whom Akhtar becomes intellectually and, potentially, romantically entangled. This professor convinces our narrator to teach a creative writing course at the university where his students then become involved in the larger narrative.
It's to Akhtar's credit that this giant, messy story feels so vital and true to life and not a hodgepodge of topics. There's an oneiric quality to the writing, themes, and conflicts that occur over a compact 300 pages. Even if the connection feels at first tenuous, Akhtar leaves subtle and overt ties between the subjects here creating a web of experience rather than a simple point A to point B plot. I know this is not going to be for everyone, but it worked exceedingly well for me.
This is in no small part due to Akhtar's splendid--dare I say radiant--writing. There's a flow here that many writers aspire to but few achieve. Shifting between the insular and incredibly personal to huge cultural and societal changes at institutions of higher learning shouldn't be as smooth as Akhtar makes it here. Akhtar's internal experience could have read like an extended micro-dose mushroom trip, but instead feels expansive and strives towards a larger understanding of human experience.
Like a stew's component parts before being cooked, The Radiance looks like it shouldn't all go together, but once you've had a proper taste, it's richness and complexity unveils itself. I loved reading this book and came away, as I did with Homeland Elegies, feeling smarter and in awe of what can still surprise in literature. This is really great stuff.
[4.5 Stars]
September 30, 2026
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture.
When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.
Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Autofiction as I've experienced it has usually fallen just a bit flat. It's a close, close relative, a fraternal twin to the roman à clef, as even Wikipedia tells the enterprising reader in search of a reason for all these damned labels slapped onto stories:
I think this read is better categorized as a roman à clef because I, not in Author Akhtar's circle, get the idea of the story and the point of telling it, but feel an empty place where SOMEthing should go...likely a name or names to tell me what is not being said.
It's not being said quite richly, in a finely textured presentation giving we-the-reader subtle and elegant extra clues to Book-Akhtar's emotional and psychic well-being or loss of same. Book-Akhtar's libido is gone post-accident, allowing him the quieter inner life needed to experience "inner transports," less base than mere orgasms. When driving to the college campus where he teaches, his "body seemed to extend beyond itself...as if it were enlarged." Quite a reward for losing one's erections, no? Now, though, he's trying to convey the "wordless magic" of this new self—eventually formally diagnosed as "post-traumatic neuropsychiatric syndrome," utterly new to me as a real diagnosis and, honestly, one I think opens up real possibilities for contextualizing PTSD.
Author Akhtar is a fascinating Asian-American creative and educator, a blend of inheritances from training to family to generational standing, all altered with finality by the awful hate crime that he's subjected to and wrestles control over by means of this book. I'm intrigued by all the most American things about him being used as fuel for hatred of a stranger: a thriver and a striver, he is the object of intended to be murderous rage. It's deeply poignant that one result of the crime is to deprive him of his libido—that essential quality needed to survive, to thrive as a human. It wasn't a planned thing, it can't be, but it was a cruel blow indeed.
In his messy personal life Book-Akhtar subjects himself to consequences after the investigation into the crime begins that are...it's a bad time to be individualistic, let's say, in academia as well as in the wider world. Lots of vectors for judgment, few of them justifiable. I'm more outraged at the intrusiveness of the modern surveillance methods available than I am about someone's private peccadillos. In the assembling of any lynch mob, the distorted version of facts plays a key role...and the said facts are much easier to access than ever today.
I'm not sure where the facts are massaged, that's the point of autofiction after all, but these outrage merchants who are trained to expostulate at the drop of a hat get very wearying. It is a story we're living through the development of in this century; it has, in this novel, therefore to seek an ending in its end. It has neither, which is why I'm giving it four stars; the point of reading a story that is still developing is to trade the satisfaction of an ending for a slice through the layer cake that is a modern academic/creative's life...to get to know the emotional landscape of a developing character.
Young Werther, anyone?
The Publisher Says: A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture.
When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.
Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Autofiction as I've experienced it has usually fallen just a bit flat. It's a close, close relative, a fraternal twin to the roman à clef, as even Wikipedia tells the enterprising reader in search of a reason for all these damned labels slapped onto stories:
In autofiction, an author may decide to recount their life in the third person, modify significant details and characters, or use invented subplots and imagined scenarios with real-life characters in service of an accurately portrayed self within the narrative. In this way, autofiction largely resembles roman à clef literature, though autofiction typically acknowledges its depiction of the author's real life. {It also shares similarities with faction, a genre devised by Truman Capote to describe his work of narrative nonfiction In Cold Blood I included this because I suspect almost 100% of my readers have read that book}.
I think this read is better categorized as a roman à clef because I, not in Author Akhtar's circle, get the idea of the story and the point of telling it, but feel an empty place where SOMEthing should go...likely a name or names to tell me what is not being said.
It's not being said quite richly, in a finely textured presentation giving we-the-reader subtle and elegant extra clues to Book-Akhtar's emotional and psychic well-being or loss of same. Book-Akhtar's libido is gone post-accident, allowing him the quieter inner life needed to experience "inner transports," less base than mere orgasms. When driving to the college campus where he teaches, his "body seemed to extend beyond itself...as if it were enlarged." Quite a reward for losing one's erections, no? Now, though, he's trying to convey the "wordless magic" of this new self—eventually formally diagnosed as "post-traumatic neuropsychiatric syndrome," utterly new to me as a real diagnosis and, honestly, one I think opens up real possibilities for contextualizing PTSD.
Author Akhtar is a fascinating Asian-American creative and educator, a blend of inheritances from training to family to generational standing, all altered with finality by the awful hate crime that he's subjected to and wrestles control over by means of this book. I'm intrigued by all the most American things about him being used as fuel for hatred of a stranger: a thriver and a striver, he is the object of intended to be murderous rage. It's deeply poignant that one result of the crime is to deprive him of his libido—that essential quality needed to survive, to thrive as a human. It wasn't a planned thing, it can't be, but it was a cruel blow indeed.
In his messy personal life Book-Akhtar subjects himself to consequences after the investigation into the crime begins that are...it's a bad time to be individualistic, let's say, in academia as well as in the wider world. Lots of vectors for judgment, few of them justifiable. I'm more outraged at the intrusiveness of the modern surveillance methods available than I am about someone's private peccadillos. In the assembling of any lynch mob, the distorted version of facts plays a key role...and the said facts are much easier to access than ever today.
I'm not sure where the facts are massaged, that's the point of autofiction after all, but these outrage merchants who are trained to expostulate at the drop of a hat get very wearying. It is a story we're living through the development of in this century; it has, in this novel, therefore to seek an ending in its end. It has neither, which is why I'm giving it four stars; the point of reading a story that is still developing is to trade the satisfaction of an ending for a slice through the layer cake that is a modern academic/creative's life...to get to know the emotional landscape of a developing character.
Young Werther, anyone?
November 10, 2026
Reviewing this book requires describing the undescribable, articulate the ineffable, put physical sensations into words and define the divine. If you require a rhythmic and progressive plot, this is not for you. It’s conversational, metaphysical, synesthesic. Sound has color, color has aroma, essence has voice. The boundaries of our senses melt away and, while there is tension and suspense, it is cultivated through the senses. It may be autofiction; this may have happened to Ayad Akhtar. When I closed the last page—I have to disclose—I thought that Akhtar must be the most introguing human being on the planet.
While bicycling through the Hudson Valley, the protagonist (same name as author) gets hit by a truck. He survives and enters an eight-month state of tanscendence. Language is not enough to describe Akhtar’s state of mind, or even his state of body. By blurring the lines of fact and invention, he uses the raw materials of his life and experiences and veers away from literal reportage. His use of autofiction allows a curated and performative version of ourselves to address the reader.
Akhtar, to me, appears to be searching for the spiritual reality of his awareness. His writing is so captivating that, at times, I fell back into the years I used hallucinogens to heighten my perceptions. Akhtar states that he entered a state “somewhere between awakening and madness,” and experienced an “ambrosial afterglow.” Moreover, he felt as though his emotions were all in primary colors.
"Above and behind me was a different radiance—not the dazzling, forward slant of time, but the upright brilliancy of a timeless present."
Luminous, mystical, and riveting, this novel is a genre bnding experience that created a neurological shift in my body. It was a literary aphrodisiac, a canvas of dreamscapes, a fever dream, a writer’s landscape of altered consciousness.
I didn’t know beforehand that Akhtar is also a playwright. I’m doubly impressed, as a play must have grounded, spoken dialogue and visible action—something thoroughly different from how this novel speaks to the reader. In The Radiance, Akhtar’s use of internal monlogue and descriptive prose is a constant. I’m excited to see on of his plays--how he theatrically uses concise language and a compressed timeline to reveal his characters and story.
While bicycling through the Hudson Valley, the protagonist (same name as author) gets hit by a truck. He survives and enters an eight-month state of tanscendence. Language is not enough to describe Akhtar’s state of mind, or even his state of body. By blurring the lines of fact and invention, he uses the raw materials of his life and experiences and veers away from literal reportage. His use of autofiction allows a curated and performative version of ourselves to address the reader.
Akhtar, to me, appears to be searching for the spiritual reality of his awareness. His writing is so captivating that, at times, I fell back into the years I used hallucinogens to heighten my perceptions. Akhtar states that he entered a state “somewhere between awakening and madness,” and experienced an “ambrosial afterglow.” Moreover, he felt as though his emotions were all in primary colors.
"Above and behind me was a different radiance—not the dazzling, forward slant of time, but the upright brilliancy of a timeless present."
Luminous, mystical, and riveting, this novel is a genre bnding experience that created a neurological shift in my body. It was a literary aphrodisiac, a canvas of dreamscapes, a fever dream, a writer’s landscape of altered consciousness.
I didn’t know beforehand that Akhtar is also a playwright. I’m doubly impressed, as a play must have grounded, spoken dialogue and visible action—something thoroughly different from how this novel speaks to the reader. In The Radiance, Akhtar’s use of internal monlogue and descriptive prose is a constant. I’m excited to see on of his plays--how he theatrically uses concise language and a compressed timeline to reveal his characters and story.
October 14, 2026
"A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture—“bordering at times on the ineffable” (Mary Gaitskill, bestselling author of Bad Behavior)."
When I writer suffers a hit and run, it affects how he thinks and how his body feels. Is it physiological or a spiritual awakening. It explores sexuality, predators in an academic setting, sexual assault and Christianity and Islam.
The book is beautifully written with stunning prose. It is highly intellectual and philosophical. It read as a mix of memoir and textbook although marketed as autofiction. I absolutely loved 25-30% of this and found the rest hard to determine what the author's message was. I had high hopes going into this based on the publisher synopsis but felt it is misleading. The subject matter and emphasis on sexualt assault and predators along with musings about orgasms made this feel monotonous.
Many thanks to NetGalley, Simon and Schuster - Summit Books for the gifted advance reader's copy. All opinions are my own.
When I writer suffers a hit and run, it affects how he thinks and how his body feels. Is it physiological or a spiritual awakening. It explores sexuality, predators in an academic setting, sexual assault and Christianity and Islam.
The book is beautifully written with stunning prose. It is highly intellectual and philosophical. It read as a mix of memoir and textbook although marketed as autofiction. I absolutely loved 25-30% of this and found the rest hard to determine what the author's message was. I had high hopes going into this based on the publisher synopsis but felt it is misleading. The subject matter and emphasis on sexualt assault and predators along with musings about orgasms made this feel monotonous.
Many thanks to NetGalley, Simon and Schuster - Summit Books for the gifted advance reader's copy. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The narrator tells his story of the aftermath of a hit and run that he suffered while bicycling that could have repercussions beyond a simple traffic accident. Akhtar gives his narrator his own name, making the reader wonder if this is metafiction or not, and there is enough in the body of the work to make one think so. Having been an Akhtar fan since seeing Disgrace on Broadway, I was unsurprised at the content, and found this novel held me with its excursions into philosophy, history, erotica and personal revelation. Highly recommended. This is going to be one of the premiere publications of the year.
Read
July 9, 2026This is a case of "it's the reader, not the writer." Ayad Akhtar is a cerebral and masterful writer but I just couldn't connect.
June 16, 2026
Mark my words this book will win awards
October 31, 2026
Autofiction on steroids.
What doesn’t this book include? This novel is sprawling, messy, all over the place, and kinda brilliant.
Blurs the line between fact and fiction: what is true, embellished or strictly borrowed.
Themes/plots: a classroom setting teaching you the methods of autofiction. It’s a campus novel. It’s about the state (and pitfalls) of higher education. It’s about a hit-and-run accident. It’s a psychological thriller of sorts. It’s a neuroscience drama. It’s about spiritual awakening. It’s a look at religious teachings. It’s about the abuse of power. It’s about sexual coercion. It’s about guilt and being complicit. It’s about the act of inaction.
Did I cover everything? No.
I don’t think this will work for everyone. I could accuse it of being overindulgent. But I can definitely commend it for being ambitious af.
What doesn’t this book include? This novel is sprawling, messy, all over the place, and kinda brilliant.
Blurs the line between fact and fiction: what is true, embellished or strictly borrowed.
Themes/plots: a classroom setting teaching you the methods of autofiction. It’s a campus novel. It’s about the state (and pitfalls) of higher education. It’s about a hit-and-run accident. It’s a psychological thriller of sorts. It’s a neuroscience drama. It’s about spiritual awakening. It’s a look at religious teachings. It’s about the abuse of power. It’s about sexual coercion. It’s about guilt and being complicit. It’s about the act of inaction.
Did I cover everything? No.
I don’t think this will work for everyone. I could accuse it of being overindulgent. But I can definitely commend it for being ambitious af.
2026
March 11, 2026ANHPI TBR
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books
📱 Thank you to NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books
October 8, 2026
When reading autofiction, it is impossible not to wonder how much is memoir vs. fiction. Although many of the events in The Radiance seemed bizarre, they could all be true. Maybe too strange for fiction. That is the genius of Akhtar. At times, the novel had an Auster-esque feeling to it of foreboding, random disruptions and coincidences. I didn't understand some of his character's philosophical paths, but I found them very intriguing. My mind is still buzzing.
Read
October 16, 2026Hmm… It wasn’t until after I’d written my review that I went back to read other reviews (and then added this note, as it seems appropriate to start here)… I find it interesting that so many early readers feel so ‘conflicted’ about how to rate or review this book.
Admittedly, I am one of them. This novel is not going to appeal to the masses. It will appeal to academics, and those with a keen interest in politics, philosophy and sex (and all the ways it can enlighten and exalt, but also harm).
I found myself engaged in portions of the book where there were actual human connections and interactions between characters; I also found myself skimming the more esoteric passages, many of which could be interpreted one of two ways 1) As realism – i.e., the author wanting to illustrate the voice of an educated intellectual or 2) as show-boating – i.e., the author showing the reader just how smart he is, how well read, how philosophically astute.
I think he tried to dial down the sanctimony when it came to politics, but was not entirely successful. As someone who is downright tired of both parties’ antics (and being assaulted daily about it in the media), I just don’t have the patience to read about it in my fiction, and I especially am not in the mood for moral high-horsing (this could be a reflection of the personal, soul-crushing environmental battles I’m facing, in which neither side is ‘the good guy’).
What I did find interesting was the portrayal of higher education and the challenges of teaching many of today’s students: young humans formed by helicopter-parenting, social media/tech, and brimming with fears and disabilities and social awkwardness. The class-writing workshop scenes were among my favorites.
Despite working in academia for years (which is to say I am accustomed to highbrow writing), and seeking smart/compelling literary fiction, this book felt like a “project” to me.
For instance, you’ll get passages like this:
It didn’t matter that we came by our self-involvement honestly, the realities of frontier life raising self-reliance and masturbation to the level of practical virtues, our puritanical obsession with homogeneity and equality exerting a cohering – and maybe necessary – pressure on a land of difference, even as it drove expressions of authenticity (especially sexual) into protective privacy.
Yes, there was just enough to lead me to the finish line – even with so many themes roiling around that it’s actually difficult for me to describe “what” this book was about. Radiance? Maybe. A snapshot of how precarious society’s grip is during such times of extremism? Probably.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
As someone who works in higher ed and also psychiatry, there was a lot to ponder in this story set in a university town on the Hudson in NYS in the present timeframe and featuring a Pakistani-American adjunct professor who is injured in a hit and run that is racially motivated.
After the accident, the narrator has some “interesting” neurological changes as a result of his injuries. While adjunct teaching a seminar in autofiction to a group of precocious and uber-PC undergrads he gets a bit in over his head.
There’s more… he has a romantic interest in a white humanities professor who is married to a Black surgeon. She’s a bit of a wild card with a “past.” He’s also got a pretty complicated cultural and generational history.
Things happen that are not surprising but certainly are complicated. Is this book also autofiction? I’m guessing yes, this is meant to be an exemplar of the genre.
In light of the political intrusions on higher ed institutions and the attacks on academic freedom in the last few years, some of what happens here will be unsettling, but not very surprising.
In the era of the helicopter-parented generation reaching college age, the main characters seem a bit naive about the potential for what happens in the classroom to have direct professional repercussions that are not pleasant.
There are a lot of literary and other erudite references and discussions in the book that were over my non-humanities head, but I still found this book quite interesting and certainly it captures the zeitgeist.
Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
After the accident, the narrator has some “interesting” neurological changes as a result of his injuries. While adjunct teaching a seminar in autofiction to a group of precocious and uber-PC undergrads he gets a bit in over his head.
There’s more… he has a romantic interest in a white humanities professor who is married to a Black surgeon. She’s a bit of a wild card with a “past.” He’s also got a pretty complicated cultural and generational history.
Things happen that are not surprising but certainly are complicated. Is this book also autofiction? I’m guessing yes, this is meant to be an exemplar of the genre.
In light of the political intrusions on higher ed institutions and the attacks on academic freedom in the last few years, some of what happens here will be unsettling, but not very surprising.
In the era of the helicopter-parented generation reaching college age, the main characters seem a bit naive about the potential for what happens in the classroom to have direct professional repercussions that are not pleasant.
There are a lot of literary and other erudite references and discussions in the book that were over my non-humanities head, but I still found this book quite interesting and certainly it captures the zeitgeist.
Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Radiance
By Ayad Akhtar
This is a very difficult read to plow through. I gave it my usual 100 pages – and it didn't engage me. Thus I didn't finish it.
And why? Well I found the writing very convoluted. Whole paragraphs that consisted of one long run-on sentence. I often found myself having to re-read these sentences, trying to figure out what the author was trying to say. I think this was supposed to be a commentary on American society today: the haves and have nots; the liberals and the conservatives – in short, the "them vs. us" mentality pervasive today.
But, if that is what the author was trying to discuss, along with the dumbing down of academia and the resulting inability of today's youth to act instead of being acted upon, his ideas got lost in the verbiage.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.
By Ayad Akhtar
This is a very difficult read to plow through. I gave it my usual 100 pages – and it didn't engage me. Thus I didn't finish it.
And why? Well I found the writing very convoluted. Whole paragraphs that consisted of one long run-on sentence. I often found myself having to re-read these sentences, trying to figure out what the author was trying to say. I think this was supposed to be a commentary on American society today: the haves and have nots; the liberals and the conservatives – in short, the "them vs. us" mentality pervasive today.
But, if that is what the author was trying to discuss, along with the dumbing down of academia and the resulting inability of today's youth to act instead of being acted upon, his ideas got lost in the verbiage.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.
August 13, 2026
⭐️⭐️
Amazingly bizarre—that’s probably the best way I can describe The Radiance. I’m giving it 2 stars mainly because it was bizarre enough to keep me reading. I kept waiting for some sense of closure or resolution for the character/author, but it never really came.
The writing was incredibly descriptive, but I struggled with the characters development and overall flow. There were also several references to political discourse throughout the book, which immediately lowered my enjoyment. Regardless of political leanings, I read fiction for escapism from current political issues, so I found the repeated references distracting.
Ultimately, this was a very unusual reading experience. I’m glad I stuck with it, but I’m not sure I ever fully understood what I was supposed to take away from it.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this advance eARC in exchange for my honest review.
Amazingly bizarre—that’s probably the best way I can describe The Radiance. I’m giving it 2 stars mainly because it was bizarre enough to keep me reading. I kept waiting for some sense of closure or resolution for the character/author, but it never really came.
The writing was incredibly descriptive, but I struggled with the characters development and overall flow. There were also several references to political discourse throughout the book, which immediately lowered my enjoyment. Regardless of political leanings, I read fiction for escapism from current political issues, so I found the repeated references distracting.
Ultimately, this was a very unusual reading experience. I’m glad I stuck with it, but I’m not sure I ever fully understood what I was supposed to take away from it.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this advance eARC in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This is my third Ayad Akhtar book, but I could not get into this one, although I kept hoping I would. The main character, a professor, is injured in a mysterious accident that affects both his body and spirit. He recuperates and finds himself in a space different than before. His thoughts wander widely – from his close friend Lucie, her husband, and their lives, to the students in his creative writing class, one student in particular, campus drama, politics, culture, etc. He alternates between the physical and metaphysical. Often, it was challenging to follow the shifts, the constant referencing of literature greats – sometimes they felt relevant, but mostly it felt they designed to impress the reader. It was slow going and I struggled to finish it. This book was not for me but hopefully will be for other readers. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.
June 26, 2026
This maybe wasn’t a good book for me to read but it was a good book. Thankful for the advanced reader copy — I think this will get pretty big. My favorite part was how sensation/physical being was central to the plot and character. Obviously, that’s what the novel explores, but I think it’s a rarity to encounter such plausible and vivid *feeling* as a driving action. I thought the auto-fiction of it all was especially interesting, particularly the structural mirroring when Ayad questioned who the protagonist should be in Susan’s story. Londyn was also so interesting. Wanted more on her.
Just a little too close to the bone for me, which made it harder to view the novel at arms length.
Just a little too close to the bone for me, which made it harder to view the novel at arms length.
Review of advance copy
First, thanks to Libro.fm for the opportunity to listen to this audiobook prior to publication.
I chose The Radiance expecting a novel centered on spiritual conflict between faiths. There is some of that here, but the book is much more interested in university politics, contemporary academic culture, and the narrator’s extended introspection.
That simply didn’t work for me. The prose is intelligent and often deliberately elevated, but the narrator spends so much time analyzing himself, his students, their identities, anxieties, relationships, and emotional responses that I kept waiting for the story to move forward. There is an enormous amount of discussion about sex, trauma, identity, and interpersonal boundaries, yet comparatively little actually happens.
I can imagine readers who enjoy cerebral campus novels and highly introspective narrators responding much more positively than I did. I went in looking for a story about competing spiritual beliefs and instead found something that often felt more like an extended meditation on contemporary university life.
Ultimately, my problem was very simple: I was bored. Not occasionally bored. Very, very bored.
I chose The Radiance expecting a novel centered on spiritual conflict between faiths. There is some of that here, but the book is much more interested in university politics, contemporary academic culture, and the narrator’s extended introspection.
That simply didn’t work for me. The prose is intelligent and often deliberately elevated, but the narrator spends so much time analyzing himself, his students, their identities, anxieties, relationships, and emotional responses that I kept waiting for the story to move forward. There is an enormous amount of discussion about sex, trauma, identity, and interpersonal boundaries, yet comparatively little actually happens.
I can imagine readers who enjoy cerebral campus novels and highly introspective narrators responding much more positively than I did. I went in looking for a story about competing spiritual beliefs and instead found something that often felt more like an extended meditation on contemporary university life.
Ultimately, my problem was very simple: I was bored. Not occasionally bored. Very, very bored.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I was unable to finish this book, which is always disappointing because I went in with high expectations. Unfortunately, the writing style made it difficult for me to stay engaged.
The tone felt very intellectual—almost more like nonfiction than a novel—which created a sense of distance from the story. The chapters were quite long and often overly wordy, making it challenging to maintain momentum. While the author clearly put a great deal of effort into detailed descriptions, I found that the sheer volume of language sometimes caused the main point to get lost.
For readers who enjoy dense, highly descriptive, and introspective writing, this may be a better fit. However, for me, it was a struggle to stay connected to the narrative, and ultimately I wasn’t able to finish.
The tone felt very intellectual—almost more like nonfiction than a novel—which created a sense of distance from the story. The chapters were quite long and often overly wordy, making it challenging to maintain momentum. While the author clearly put a great deal of effort into detailed descriptions, I found that the sheer volume of language sometimes caused the main point to get lost.
For readers who enjoy dense, highly descriptive, and introspective writing, this may be a better fit. However, for me, it was a struggle to stay connected to the narrative, and ultimately I wasn’t able to finish.
Review of advance copy received from Shelf Awareness Pro
Review written By Eva HD.
"Ayad Akhtar is a writer with a very forceful sense of what is. The fact that he comfortably inhabits the world of the mystical, the liminal, the felt-but-not-understood, the fundamentally irrational, is, paradoxically, as much an earmark of his writing as his workmanlike, scrubbed clean behind the ears, all-American pragmatism.
In 2020’s Homeland Elegies, readers were first introduced to Akhtar’s alter-ego, a writer who shares many biographical details with Ayad Akhtar himself – including his name. Wisconsin-bred, of Pakistani heritage, Ayad-the-narrator is a playwright and novelist of some acclaim who has found himself, at the outset of The Radiance, recently single and spending the pandemic in a sleepy college town in upstate New York, with only, for the most part, a local couple, Lucie and Stanford, for company. Lucie is a professor at the nearby university, and gets Ayad a job as a creative writing instructor there. That Ayad is infatuated with Lucie – whose scholarly work is largely concerned with sex, obsession, and love – and that Lucie is eventually disgraced in a sexual scandal that rocks the campus – is secondary to the inciting concern of the novel: the epiphany Ayad experiences after rupturing his spleen in a cycling accident. What follows is a series of events as emotionally unpredictable as they are, we are given to understand, inevitable.
A tale of exo-spiritual conversion moonlighting as a campus novel, and a meditation on the moldering decay at the heart of US academic and intellectual culture, The Radiance has a breathlessly compulsive quality – mirroring, not accidentally, the broader discourse it excoriates (deftly elegised as a “general atmosphere of not questioning your own motives”). Heart on its sleeve, infatuated with symmetries and confluences and consonances, Ayad’s brisk first-person narration plashes along, glittering like a sonata by Mozart – a discussion of whose genius bookends the novel’s revelations. This leitmotif is anything but incidental; the book’s rush of associations and ideas is wrapped in a structure as comforting and propulsive as the chord progression in a top 40 summertime banger. For amidst the philosophising and the earnest investigation of the political and spiritual uses – and limits – of human sexuality against a backdrop of vertiginous generational divide, there is the robustness of a page-turning romp: this is the most playful of Akhtar’s writing to date. The result is a cumulative – radiant, even – sense of knowing as powerful as the epiphany investigated within its pages.
Consequently, The Radiance is essentially spoiler-proof: we know from the beginning that Lucie is famed for anatomising in essay form a sexual adventure she had with a married professor twenty years prior; that she and her husband Stanford, a doctor, have had run-ins with locals resentful of their politics, class, and race; that Lucie’s pet student, Susan, is the lone freethinking bulwark against the performatively woke herd mentality of the rest of her classmates; and that an interrogation of Ayad’s post-traumatic effulgence will figure substantially in the narrative to come. We also know that any assumptions stitched into these first pages will unravel spectacularly before the book is through. (Clearly, Lucie’s brashly unapologetic, sex-as-power-tool brand of turn of the millennium feminism has aged poorly in the eyes of her students, many of whom see her as little more than a superannuated apologist for abuse.) Akhtar gives us the plot immediately off the top, as clinically as one might conduct an undergrad seminar on how to write a story: he tells us exactly what's on the menu, and then has the wherewithal to astound us with the feast. This is the book's structural, and philosophical, triumph. Like any great prestidigitator, the author knows that saying the magic is happening while making it happen, is the trick itself.
Akhtar is a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve, and nothing is too rarified or plebian for his magpie sensibility: nods to John Williams’ beloved campus classic Stoner and the Symposium by Plato jostle companionably against discussions of Finding Nemo and the Prophet Mohammed. Along the way, we are treated to a colourful cast of extras representing, variously, the confused political orthodoxies of the nativist working class; the adamantine moral chauvinism of righteous youth; the louche sexual mores of the intellectual elite; the bootstrap conservatism of ethnic minorities chafing against the dictates of the dominant culture, master’s tools firmly in hand; the floundering whimsy of the pundit class in the face of comprehensive social collapse; and the identity-starved peregrinations of contemporary American masculinity, at sea. Throughout, we are privy to a sort of irony-laced panegyric to the modern male desperate fumble towards selfhood in a world of wise (if often blinded by their own certitude), powerful, and ambitious women. Amid this feast of human folly, in Dickensian fashion people are regularly revealed, betrayed, and undone by their own features. But the portrait of society, and each struggling, unique human life within it is never ungentle: perhaps most surprising (given a general contemporary callousness in this regard) is Akhtar’s tenderness and attention in describing the very youngest of today’s adults. Ayad’s observations gleaned from the seminar he’s taken on with no small enthusiasm, for example that his students never speak “personally about sex unless it had caused them harm” are exquisitely sensitive and attuned to these young students’ lives and values, while carrying, as the unvarnished truth tends to do, a sting that borders on satire. His eventual realisation that he – along with everyone alive – is, amid the beauty of existence, also dying is all the more poignant.
Ayad-the-narrator, our writer protagonist, knows that names carry great power—he’s almost moved to tears when a therapist uses his—and selects them, as he himself tells us, with great care. What are we to make of him sharing this essential mark of identity with his canny creator? Again, at last, from the very beginning, his trick—the oldest in the book—is telling us everything."
"Ayad Akhtar is a writer with a very forceful sense of what is. The fact that he comfortably inhabits the world of the mystical, the liminal, the felt-but-not-understood, the fundamentally irrational, is, paradoxically, as much an earmark of his writing as his workmanlike, scrubbed clean behind the ears, all-American pragmatism.
In 2020’s Homeland Elegies, readers were first introduced to Akhtar’s alter-ego, a writer who shares many biographical details with Ayad Akhtar himself – including his name. Wisconsin-bred, of Pakistani heritage, Ayad-the-narrator is a playwright and novelist of some acclaim who has found himself, at the outset of The Radiance, recently single and spending the pandemic in a sleepy college town in upstate New York, with only, for the most part, a local couple, Lucie and Stanford, for company. Lucie is a professor at the nearby university, and gets Ayad a job as a creative writing instructor there. That Ayad is infatuated with Lucie – whose scholarly work is largely concerned with sex, obsession, and love – and that Lucie is eventually disgraced in a sexual scandal that rocks the campus – is secondary to the inciting concern of the novel: the epiphany Ayad experiences after rupturing his spleen in a cycling accident. What follows is a series of events as emotionally unpredictable as they are, we are given to understand, inevitable.
A tale of exo-spiritual conversion moonlighting as a campus novel, and a meditation on the moldering decay at the heart of US academic and intellectual culture, The Radiance has a breathlessly compulsive quality – mirroring, not accidentally, the broader discourse it excoriates (deftly elegised as a “general atmosphere of not questioning your own motives”). Heart on its sleeve, infatuated with symmetries and confluences and consonances, Ayad’s brisk first-person narration plashes along, glittering like a sonata by Mozart – a discussion of whose genius bookends the novel’s revelations. This leitmotif is anything but incidental; the book’s rush of associations and ideas is wrapped in a structure as comforting and propulsive as the chord progression in a top 40 summertime banger. For amidst the philosophising and the earnest investigation of the political and spiritual uses – and limits – of human sexuality against a backdrop of vertiginous generational divide, there is the robustness of a page-turning romp: this is the most playful of Akhtar’s writing to date. The result is a cumulative – radiant, even – sense of knowing as powerful as the epiphany investigated within its pages.
Consequently, The Radiance is essentially spoiler-proof: we know from the beginning that Lucie is famed for anatomising in essay form a sexual adventure she had with a married professor twenty years prior; that she and her husband Stanford, a doctor, have had run-ins with locals resentful of their politics, class, and race; that Lucie’s pet student, Susan, is the lone freethinking bulwark against the performatively woke herd mentality of the rest of her classmates; and that an interrogation of Ayad’s post-traumatic effulgence will figure substantially in the narrative to come. We also know that any assumptions stitched into these first pages will unravel spectacularly before the book is through. (Clearly, Lucie’s brashly unapologetic, sex-as-power-tool brand of turn of the millennium feminism has aged poorly in the eyes of her students, many of whom see her as little more than a superannuated apologist for abuse.) Akhtar gives us the plot immediately off the top, as clinically as one might conduct an undergrad seminar on how to write a story: he tells us exactly what's on the menu, and then has the wherewithal to astound us with the feast. This is the book's structural, and philosophical, triumph. Like any great prestidigitator, the author knows that saying the magic is happening while making it happen, is the trick itself.
Akhtar is a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve, and nothing is too rarified or plebian for his magpie sensibility: nods to John Williams’ beloved campus classic Stoner and the Symposium by Plato jostle companionably against discussions of Finding Nemo and the Prophet Mohammed. Along the way, we are treated to a colourful cast of extras representing, variously, the confused political orthodoxies of the nativist working class; the adamantine moral chauvinism of righteous youth; the louche sexual mores of the intellectual elite; the bootstrap conservatism of ethnic minorities chafing against the dictates of the dominant culture, master’s tools firmly in hand; the floundering whimsy of the pundit class in the face of comprehensive social collapse; and the identity-starved peregrinations of contemporary American masculinity, at sea. Throughout, we are privy to a sort of irony-laced panegyric to the modern male desperate fumble towards selfhood in a world of wise (if often blinded by their own certitude), powerful, and ambitious women. Amid this feast of human folly, in Dickensian fashion people are regularly revealed, betrayed, and undone by their own features. But the portrait of society, and each struggling, unique human life within it is never ungentle: perhaps most surprising (given a general contemporary callousness in this regard) is Akhtar’s tenderness and attention in describing the very youngest of today’s adults. Ayad’s observations gleaned from the seminar he’s taken on with no small enthusiasm, for example that his students never speak “personally about sex unless it had caused them harm” are exquisitely sensitive and attuned to these young students’ lives and values, while carrying, as the unvarnished truth tends to do, a sting that borders on satire. His eventual realisation that he – along with everyone alive – is, amid the beauty of existence, also dying is all the more poignant.
Ayad-the-narrator, our writer protagonist, knows that names carry great power—he’s almost moved to tears when a therapist uses his—and selects them, as he himself tells us, with great care. What are we to make of him sharing this essential mark of identity with his canny creator? Again, at last, from the very beginning, his trick—the oldest in the book—is telling us everything."
November 4, 2026
A writer who has rented a house in the Hudson Valley, where he intends to finish the book he has been working on becomes involved in the lives of his neighbors -- a writer/professor at a nearby college and her surgeon husband -- and is hit by a truck while out riding a bicycle. As he recovers, he experiences something he refers to as a 'polychromatic swirl' and the sensation that the left side of his body no longer belongs to the right side. Strange stuff. Despite references to Dostoevsky and Chekhov, this book barely inched past my "Fifty Page Test." I was curious enough to finish it, but I wouldn't recommend it. (My two-star rating is probably overgenerous.) The characters are not engaging and the situation, despite the well-drawn setting, not very involving. (Confession: I am always uneasy with novels that have protagonists with the same name as the author him/herself. Is the book a fictionalized memoir? If so, how much of it is true and how much fanciful? These questions draw me out of the narrative and diminish my delight in the reading experience itself.)
September 15, 2026
Do you like books that make you feel confused, a little bit dumb? Then this one's for you! Filled with deep literary references and religious and metaphysical themes, I'm not sure there was a point where I knew WTH was going on in this book. There was an attempted murder and attempted suicide, some kind of rapturous enlightenment, some professoring that may or may not have crossed the line, some in-your-face commentary on GenZ mental health and entitlement, some sexual issues, some childhood family trauma, and some very unprofessional psychology sessions. So. Much. Going. On. All while nothing REALLY happened. I do give credit for some talented writing of very descriptive and visual scenes (thus the two stars vs one), but outside of that, couldn't wait to finish this one--it was the closest I've come to a DNF in a while!
++++
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.
++++
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I'll be honest - I can't remember the last time I was more lost and confused by an author's writing style and language. Ayad Akhtar is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and acclaimed novelist, but sadly, his visionary work of spiritual transformation was above and beyond me.
I'll be the first to admit I struggle with metaphysical literature. (Paulo Coelho is just about as lyrical as my realist and factual, former newspaper reporter brain can comprehend). The writing was beautifully descriptive but I struggled with the lack of character development and the erratic, stream of consciousness style flow. Plus, there were a host of literary, political, religious and other erudite references and discourses far above my head. I love to learn from reading books but this one was beyond my comprehension.
Thank you Summit Books @summitbooks for the opportunity to read this ARC. Sorry I wasn't the right reader for this novel.
I'll be the first to admit I struggle with metaphysical literature. (Paulo Coelho is just about as lyrical as my realist and factual, former newspaper reporter brain can comprehend). The writing was beautifully descriptive but I struggled with the lack of character development and the erratic, stream of consciousness style flow. Plus, there were a host of literary, political, religious and other erudite references and discourses far above my head. I love to learn from reading books but this one was beyond my comprehension.
Thank you Summit Books @summitbooks for the opportunity to read this ARC. Sorry I wasn't the right reader for this novel.
May 25, 2026
This is one of those books where you get to the end and think – what just happened? Although the cover is clearly marked “novel”, it felt more like an autobiography as the protagonist was the author, Ayad Akhtar. Clearly there was turmoil in his life.
After he ruptured his spleen in a biking “accident“– to be investigated throughout the story – he began to see life in a different light. He took on a job as a professor of a creative writing class, but the students were a challenge at best. Besides the culture of today’s campus, Ayad experiences post-accident, transcendental experiences that he has a hard time accepting.
Interesting read, and masterful writing, but a little too heavy for my taste.
After he ruptured his spleen in a biking “accident“– to be investigated throughout the story – he began to see life in a different light. He took on a job as a professor of a creative writing class, but the students were a challenge at best. Besides the culture of today’s campus, Ayad experiences post-accident, transcendental experiences that he has a hard time accepting.
Interesting read, and masterful writing, but a little too heavy for my taste.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
“The Radiance” is an incredibly layered, smart, beautiful book. I almost had to consciously change the way my brain wanted to read it, and I feel a little smarter for having done so. I will be shocked if this doesn’t get some accolades, if not significant ones.
To start, this is an unusual novel. It’s autofiction, which I hadn’t even heard of until reading it, so Akhtar is both our narrator and protagonist. There are two main storylines: one following his transcendental experience after an accident, and the other following his professorship amid a college scandal involving his close friend, Lucie, whom he reveres. The storylines feel distinct, but they’re woven together masterfully. I was completely immersed in both and never found myself wishing we’d get back to the other, which can happen with parallel plots.
There are a LOT of themes here, many of which I’m sure went over my head. Eventually I just kind of…accepted that and let myself absorb what I could without getting too tangled up trying to parse every message. I hope to reread this someday because I’m sure more will come through when I do.
Writing-wise…my god. Stunning, visceral, and challenging. I had to look up definitions a LOT, but the word choice felt so precise and intentional that it was worth slowing down for. Despite how advanced the prose is, it never felt pretentious. This is a deeply philosophical book dealing with existence, love, sex, faith, identity, and morality, but I never felt preached to. That’s impressive.
Some of what Akhtar explores critically is sensitive, and I have a feeling this book is going to rub some people the wrong way. There are criticisms of cancel culture, woke culture, sexual autonomy, and campus politics, among other things. I’d just say that if you find yourself tensing up or getting defensive while reading this (like I did), STICK IT OUT. It’s intentional. Let yourself feel the feelings, keep an open mind, and see where it takes you.
Anyway, that’s more than I needed to say, but I had to get my computer out for this review, which I don’t normally do. This was great. I can’t wait to hear what people have to say about it when it publishes.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
To start, this is an unusual novel. It’s autofiction, which I hadn’t even heard of until reading it, so Akhtar is both our narrator and protagonist. There are two main storylines: one following his transcendental experience after an accident, and the other following his professorship amid a college scandal involving his close friend, Lucie, whom he reveres. The storylines feel distinct, but they’re woven together masterfully. I was completely immersed in both and never found myself wishing we’d get back to the other, which can happen with parallel plots.
There are a LOT of themes here, many of which I’m sure went over my head. Eventually I just kind of…accepted that and let myself absorb what I could without getting too tangled up trying to parse every message. I hope to reread this someday because I’m sure more will come through when I do.
Writing-wise…my god. Stunning, visceral, and challenging. I had to look up definitions a LOT, but the word choice felt so precise and intentional that it was worth slowing down for. Despite how advanced the prose is, it never felt pretentious. This is a deeply philosophical book dealing with existence, love, sex, faith, identity, and morality, but I never felt preached to. That’s impressive.
Some of what Akhtar explores critically is sensitive, and I have a feeling this book is going to rub some people the wrong way. There are criticisms of cancel culture, woke culture, sexual autonomy, and campus politics, among other things. I’d just say that if you find yourself tensing up or getting defensive while reading this (like I did), STICK IT OUT. It’s intentional. Let yourself feel the feelings, keep an open mind, and see where it takes you.
Anyway, that’s more than I needed to say, but I had to get my computer out for this review, which I don’t normally do. This was great. I can’t wait to hear what people have to say about it when it publishes.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
August 30, 2026
This fascinating novel is difficult to describe. The narrator, Ayad, is a writer living in upstate New York. He is hit by a truck while cycling on a country road. As he recovers, he notices that he feels emotions differently and perceives others’ emotions strongly. There is also a storyline involving Ayad’s friend Lucie, who becomes embroiled in a campus scandal. And there are startling revelations about Ayad’s father.
This book was mesmerizing. Sometimes I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening or how the storylines fit together, but I could not put this one down. I think this novel has a lot to say about our current moment: violence, political divides, generational divides, campus politics, political correctness, cancel culture, compassion, and empathy. It’s a kind of kaleidoscope through which you can see shifting realities and take from it what resonates most strongly. I can see myself rereading this one at some point.
Thank you to NetGalley and Summit Books for allowing me to read an ARC of this title.
This book was mesmerizing. Sometimes I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening or how the storylines fit together, but I could not put this one down. I think this novel has a lot to say about our current moment: violence, political divides, generational divides, campus politics, political correctness, cancel culture, compassion, and empathy. It’s a kind of kaleidoscope through which you can see shifting realities and take from it what resonates most strongly. I can see myself rereading this one at some point.
Thank you to NetGalley and Summit Books for allowing me to read an ARC of this title.
October 29, 2026
I loved it. Here’s a quote for ya to illustrate why:
“Plato had been transforming lives for two millennia for good reason. His philosophy was rooted in feeling, in yearning, in the most fundamental of all human experiences: falling in love. For Plato, life didn’t even begin until love entered it—awakening jeopardy, exposing what we lacked, pointing us toward what we might become. It was a ‘madness’ that made us see, a birthright that, yes, mishandled, could lead to life-endangering delusion. But no less readily, falling in love was our only reliable window onto the world’s basic rightness.”
“Plato had been transforming lives for two millennia for good reason. His philosophy was rooted in feeling, in yearning, in the most fundamental of all human experiences: falling in love. For Plato, life didn’t even begin until love entered it—awakening jeopardy, exposing what we lacked, pointing us toward what we might become. It was a ‘madness’ that made us see, a birthright that, yes, mishandled, could lead to life-endangering delusion. But no less readily, falling in love was our only reliable window onto the world’s basic rightness.”
October 30, 2026
Some brilliant sentences, some fascinating ideas, a lot of words I had to look up, some head scratching, some confusion, some moments of intrigue, and a feeling that a lot of this went over my head.
November 2, 2026
This was not the book for me.
August 24, 2026
What better setting for fraught questions of cultural warfare and identity politics than the college campus, ground zero for so many increasingly self-important, verging-on-hollow battles over moral authority?
I won’t pretend to have understood all of the dense metaphysics. Akhtar’s writing is beautiful, though at times so elaborate that it starts to feel impersonal. What really interested me was the tension between the protagonist’s spiritual transformation after his accident and the novel’s rich, emotionally exhausting, audacious critique of today’s harmful moral posturing.
Provocative, suspenseful, intellectually rigorous.
I won’t pretend to have understood all of the dense metaphysics. Akhtar’s writing is beautiful, though at times so elaborate that it starts to feel impersonal. What really interested me was the tension between the protagonist’s spiritual transformation after his accident and the novel’s rich, emotionally exhausting, audacious critique of today’s harmful moral posturing.
Provocative, suspenseful, intellectually rigorous.
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