The Red Word
Winner of the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (Canada)
Nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK)
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
A Chatelaine Top 18 Book of 2018
A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry—particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed “Gang Bang Central” and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture—but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.
The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas. With strains of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.
"Groundbreaking and provocative, this is an astonishing evisceration of the clichés of sexual politics as they exist not only on our college campuses, but also within broader present-day society. Alternately heartbreaking, funny, and critical, no one gets off easily. The Red Word plumbs the depths of literature, mythology, history, philosophy, and a host of contemporary issues—an utterly effing good read." —Governor General’s Literary Award Jury Citation
“Henstra draws on Greek mythology to comment on contemporary issues—how assault can take on ambiguity and how the internalization of rape culture convolutes gender politics, to the point where constructive conversation is nearly impossible.” —The New Yorker
“Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking.”—Cosmopolitan
“Stylistically innovative… perfectly captures the self-importance of youth and, simultaneously, nostalgia for the age when everything could mean so much.” —The Globe and Mail
"Timely and incisive, young adult author Sarah Henstra makes her adult fiction debut with this tale of collegiate politics and campus rape. Infused with Homerian weight, the novel is appropriately Greek-focused, centering on a controversy between bad boy fraternity house Gamma Beta Chi, the radical feminists of Raghurst, and a young woman caught between the two when a set-up to call out the fraternity's rape culture leads to unintended tragedy." —Harper's Bazaar
“The smartest, most provocative novel I’ve read in a long time. Sarah Henstra dives headlong into some murky, turbulent waters — gender politics, campus sexual assault, complicity, moral responsibility — and emerges with a book that’s as shocking as it is essential.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and Nine Inches
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about The Red Word since I devoured it in one sitting.” —Louise O’Neill, author of Asking for It and Almost Love
“Witty and original . . . a bold new voice in Canadian fiction.” —Helen Humphreys, author of The Evening Chorus
“The Red Word is a profoundly contemporary take on one of our oldest and most corrosive stories. In note-perfect prose, Sarah Henstra sings of war at its most personal, the myth of conquest brought home to bleed on the hearth. A fierce and devastatingly timely debut.” — Alissa York, author of Effigy and The Naturalist
“The Red Word is a beautifully written, gripping take on the battle between the sexes. Both houses are built on mythologies shored up by unquestioning allegiances, and the chaos that ensues leaves casualties on all sides.” —Financial Times
“The Red Word is set in the 1990s but speaks directly to the present feminist moment. Sarah Henstra takes us into two worlds: that of Women’s Studies classes and lesbian pagan rituals, and of frat boys and S&M theme parties. As I watched Karen struggle with politics, power, and her own culpability in the fallout of I could not put this book down.” —Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde and Sister Golden Hair
"An aesthetically arresting interrogation of rape culture on campus...Timely and brilliant." —Kirkus Reviews
"The writing in The Red Word is undeniably gripping and at times beautiful, seamlessly weaving the Greek mythology Karen is studying in class into her own personal story and creating realistic, complex characters the reader wants to root for despite their flaws." —Quill & Quire (starred review)
"Set in the 1990s, The Red Word interrogates the prevailing political preoccupations of that time: gender politics, third-wave feminism, and consent...A timely and nuanced dissection of rape culture ensues." —Booklist
“[Henstra] writes sensitively and fluently on sex, desire, rape and power… an almost seamless mix of high and low cultures that offers a timely treatise on rape culture in elite universities.” —Irish Times