The ever-surprising John Updike’s twenty-second novel is a brilliant contemporary fiction that will surely be counted as one of his most powerful. It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur’an, as expounded to him by a local mosque’s imam.

The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey. Neither the world-weary, depressed guidance counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad’s mischievously seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.

But to quote the Qur’an: Of those who plot, God is the best.</p>

约翰·厄普代克一九三二年生于美国宾夕法尼亚州希灵顿。一九五四年毕业于哈佛学院，后在英国牛津的拉斯金绘画和艺术学校学习一年。一九五五至一九五七年间供职于《纽约客》杂志，自一九五七年起定居马萨诸塞州。厄普代克著有五十多部作品，其中包括短篇小说集、诗集和评论集。作品曾获美国国家图书奖、普利策奖、欧·亨利奖等奖项。