Becoming Radicalized: An Interview with John Wray

John Wray seems restless under the confines of any single identity. He writes fiction in English and German, carries both a United States and an Austrian passport, and works under a pseudonym. The Right Hand of Sleep, which won Wray a Whiting Award, is an austere political thriller; Canaan’s Tongue is a supernatural Southern gothic; and Lowboy, his 2009 breakthrough, narrates one day in the life of a schizophrenic teenager roaming the subway tunnels beneath New York City. “These days, writers have brands,” wrote Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times when Wray’s fourth novel, The Lost Time Accidents, was published in 2016. “Wray is all over the place … What to expect of his next book? Something not much like his last.”

To some of us, however, Wray’s shape-shifting is a source of fascination.

Wray’s fifth novel, Godsend, is forthcoming this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of eighteen-year-old Aden Sawyer’s journey from the suburban California of her childhood to a Pakistani Koran school, and from there across the mountains into Afghanistan, a place—for a teenage American girl ignorant of the culture’s tribal code—of dreadful, mortal danger. It is derived, to a degree, from the true story of John Walker Lindh, the young man who became infamous in the weeks after the attacks of September 11 as the “American Taliban.” But it owes just as much to a story Wray heard while traveling as a journalist in Afghanistan, about a girl of British background who fought there among the mujahideen, disguised as a