The Radiance (Summit Books, 2026) is not long for a novel, but Ayad Akhtar’s prose packs immense beauty and meaning into a small package. The setting may be familiar to readers in a general sense—a Hudson Valley liberal arts college. The context also provides the timeworn tension between academics and townspeople—a mix of racially diverse, enlightenment-seeking liberals, versus an older, mostly white populace.
Ayad, the protagonist, at first based in New York City, struggles to complete a novel long in the works. He moves upstate to Kinderhook, where President Martin van Buren resided, to a rental house with a “swimming pond” and a resident heron. His description of the pond might be parlayed into a discourse on life’s larger themes: “The marsh behind it was coming to unruly life, its orchestra of crickets, toads, starlings, and rails offering a pleasing cacophony against which the piercing wail of a solitary loon sounded from deeper within.” The simplest of settings can read like heartachingly evocative poetry.
One day Ayad takes a bike ride, and is hit from behind and taken to the hospital; his spleen, now ruptured, is removed. Upon waking, he is altered: “I say I’m seeing this light, but it’s more like I’m feeling it—palpably. Or even like I hear it,” he says to Lucie, a professor friend who cares for him after the accident. His whole body seems to process emotion and pathos, not just his mind.
In the wake of his medical tribulations, including a thickened left insula in the brain, Ayad has gained the ability to empathize with people he might normally disdain. This includes the man he suspects hit him, whose truck is identified by a racist bumper sticker recalled by an airborne Ayad in his flashback. Even though it’s possible the man hit him on purpose, when Ayad encounters him in a cemetery grieving for his lost son, compassion pours out for him. It seems that in every interpersonal encounter, he swells with empathy and a vast sense of humanity.
Ayad is recruited by Lucie to teach a seminar in autofiction at the college. One of his students, Susan, has been cited by Lucie and other faculty as an outstanding student, intellectually far advanced despite being raised an adopted child by a controlling, unstable mother. Susan becomes a kind of proxy for the various strains of campus life—hair trigger cultural sensitivities, overly close relationships between faculty/students and the power dynamics therein, and victimization blame games. Without giving away too much, Susan is involved in the most extreme plot twists, with the most dramatic revealed at the very end.
Akhtar examines existential topics: Why are emotions centered in the brain? What is the soul? He paraphrases the Phaedrus: “Plato has Socrates say that anything that moves but is moved by something other than itself is not the soul. ‘The soul,’ he says, ‘is that which moves itself—and never stops being in motion.’” He handles such complex, profound topics eloquently, but also captures more primal states through baser references: Of a collective fear he senses in a local bar: “I could smell it: an odor like that of rust, slightly acrid, a smell of decay less pungent than bitter, with top notes of distress and base notes of grief.” But despite his heightened awareness of this creeping dread, he says, “I wanted a beer. I just wanted to be happy.”
As he recuperates, his hypersensitivity fades, leaving him beached with his old gripes and grudges. Ayad travels to France to attend his cousin’s wedding. He visits Chartres, with which his cousin’s fiance is obsessed. The train trip is delayed by wildfires set by protesters, and when he arrives, he finds nothing particularly inspiring, until he pays a visit to the crypt and has an encounter that he deems a “so-called miracle.” It’s another instance of the banal alchemizing into the sublime in this transporting novel.
This article appears in November 2026.
