- Published: 20 March 2017
- ISBN: 9780241977880
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 240
White Tears
- Published: 20 March 2017
- ISBN: 9780241977880
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 240
[A] stunning, audacious, urgent thriller, as challenging as it is terrifying, as brave as it is brutal... It will shock you, horrify you, unsettle you, and that's exactly the point. It lets nothing and nobody off the hook
NPR
Delilloesque -- moody, threatening, and profoundly dark... A story about ghosts, about grievances leaking through the fabric of decades, and about retribution, violence and hatred. At every turn, Kunzru's words concoct a dreamlike world where the past isn't dead and the boundaries of reality flicker at the margins.
Huffington Post
Haunting, doom-drenched, genuinely and viscerally disturbing... Kunzru showcases his trademark exhilarating prose throughout - closing with a conclusion that packs a real punch
Independent
Like Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch... A stunning novel of ideas that becomes a page-turning thriller... During Trump's presidency, reading White Tears feels like a necessary and exhilarating act
Stylist
Visceral horror, pacey storytelling and razor tautness. White Tears is a state-of-the-nation novel that ties pre-Civil Rights barbarism with a contemporary amnesia that parades as post racial America
Evening Standard
Exquisite... captures a yearning achieved fleetingly in life and more fully in art
i
At its heart is a serious reminder of how too often history robs the powerless of their voices
Daily Mail
Think of it as a socially-aware Goosebumps book for grown-ups
Shortlist
What begins as dude-bro send-up soon spirals into a supernatural revenge fantasy keyed to America's history of racism
Observer
A captivating satire about race and music
The Week, Novel of the Week
Both like a radical revenge fantasia and a stern lesson in radical empathy
Spectator
Kunzru's awareness and discernment have particular value in an America of the moment where nothing less than the country's meaning is at stake... unmoored between the heart that's felt it and the tip of the tongue that awaits the heart's transmission, in search of a promise that's determined to keep itself
The New York Times
A disorientating odyssey through decades of American history...Kunzru has always been an assured and intellectually gifted novelist, but I am not sure he has ever before displaying such emotional heft
Daily Telegraph
A witty, strange and often very moving book
Financial Times
Deep themes on the nature of memory, race and authenticity
The Times
A brave book and often very funny
Sunday Telegraph
White Tears is a book that everyone should be reading right now
TIME Magazine
Graceful [and] exquisitely attuned
Washington Post
[An] excellent ghost story... A mesmerising tale of white guilt and black oppression in America
Evening Standard
A nightmarish page-turner... A disorientating odyssey through American history and a lesson in what happens when art is hijacked for less than noble aims
Daily Telegraph
This rich novel embraces the Deep South, a murder and a wealthy family's dark secret, while riffing on art and authenticity
Mail on Sunday
Full of verve and rhythm, White Tears cleverly skewers ideas about angst surrounding white appropriation of black music
Financial Times
A fast-paced, ambitious, hallucinatory mystery
Publishers Weekly
Marvellous, original and intelligent. Kunzru writes like a master storyteller... There's simply nothing [he] couldn't manage in prose
Literary Review
Compulsively readable, masterly - a tour de force
Rachel Kushner
Hari Kunzru is an incredibly versatile writer who is alert to the inequalities in the world... Powerful and complex, White Tears is a novel about abuses of wealth and power. Brilliantly orchestrated, unforgettable and devastating
Bernardine Evaristo
Hari Kunzru is one of our most important novelists
Independent on Sunday
Kunzru's engagingly wired prose and agile plotting sweep all before them
New Yorker
Publisher's description. Electrifying, subversive and wildly original, White Tears is a ghost story and a love story, a story about lost innocence and historical guilt. This unmissable novel penetrates the heart of a nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge and exploitation, and holding a mirror up to the true nature of America today.
Penguin
Riveting from the very first page, I was completely addicted... A literary thriller and a timely, unsparing excavation of the very real spectre of race in America's past and present. White Tears is proof that Kunzru is one of the finest novelists of his generation...
Mirza Waheed