Run And Hide

Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man's humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth - what it means on a human level, and what it costs. Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction

Jennifer Egan

Terrific . . . elegantly written, incisively observed, and deeply satisfying to read

Kamila Shamsie

This powerful novel is a searing examination of our recent cultural and political trajectory, a surprising meditation on the role of the writer in times such as ours, a fragile love story, and an unforgiving look at where we are headed. It is, in other words, a book that demands to be read and rewards reading

Mohsin Hamid

Pankaj Mishra returns to fiction after two decades with a gripping and remarkable novel - his best work yet. It captures the trajectory of our time through insights and moments that are startling, pure, and have a strange inevitability

Amit Chaudhuri

A profound, extraordinarily written, and devastating exploration of the ways the personal is always already the political. Unforgettable

Neel Mukherjee

Pankaj Mishra writes with great intelligence and lyrical beauty about the perennial struggle for dignity and stability in a rapidly changing world - and how, in this process, identities are reinvented, reclaimed or renegotiated

Laila Lalami

Pankaj Mishra kept us waiting 20 years for a new novel, and it becomes apparent, as soon as you pick up Run and Hide, that time has honed one of our greatest writing talents. The narrative draws you in more keenly than any boxset and the prose shimmers with wisdom. Marvellous

Sathnam Sanghera

Run and Hide is achingly irresistible and terrifyingly bracing - like seeing yourself or your world, without illusion, for the first time. It is the coup de literature our demented age needs from one of the finest, bravest writers we have

Junot Diaz

An intense, probing novel examines rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy

Kirkus Starred Review

Mishra offers a deeply critical portrait of what he terms the 'IIT generation' of educated Indians who made their fortunes in a rapidly changing India and globalizing world and of the personal and social costs of those changes . . . A vivid, multifaceted study

Library Journal

Indian author Pankaj Mishra has dedicated his career to analyzing the psychology of Asia's rising masses, particularly its young men. His latest work, a novel, Run and Hide, is his most searing look at the subject yet

The Intercept

A beautifully written novel that captures the complexities and challenges of growing up in India and the simultaneous struggle to find meaning and a way forward in life

Booklist

Run and Hide, is an exciting follow-up to his 1999 debut, The Romantics . . . Mishra brings to bear both the high style of his fiction and the clarity of his criticism for an affecting, world-spanning story about capitalism, art, and globalization

Vulture, 49 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2022

Run and Hide is savage and tender, and shockingly spiritual. This book may not change your life but it'll entertain the hell out of you

Mohammed Hanif

There is tragedy when a spurned and forsaken world turns out to be a paradise in disguise, and when it calls its children home, the children are too unmoored, too compromised to return. That is the monumental, ultra-modern drama Pankaj Mishra unfolds in Run and Hide, a novel of devastating loss and moral collapse worthy of Henry James

Joshua Ferris

The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you'd expect... As an exuberant chronicle of a late capitalist world fatally mediated by Twitter and Instagram, Run and Hide might be the most zeitgeisty novel you could read

Spectator

In his first novel in more than 20 years, acclaimed essayist Mishra splices a cautionary tale with elegant examination of globalisation and the perils of the changing world order. Immensely thought-provoking

Mail on Sunday

A lyrical letter from the new India...a profoundly literary voice, as interested in how to write about a subject as the subject itself

Guardian

A well-written and engaging tale

Publishers Association

A wonderfully rich and enjoyable novel . . . a work for our time and one that will surely be read many years on for what will then be its historical interest . . . a novel built to last

Scotsman

The changing forms of his writing, always straining to encompass the chaotic reality Mishra sees around himself, reveal him to be a profoundly literary voice, as interested in how to write about a subject as the subject itself...After the density of his recent books, with their weighty bibliographies, Mishra's fictional prose is permitted, once again, to take lyrical flight

Guardian

There is more than a whiff of The Great Gatsby . . . Mishra's satire recalls Tom Wolfe or Bret Easton Ellis

Prospect

I was left hoping I won't have to wait another 20 years for Mishra's next novel

i Paper

Whether writing about a Himalayan village or cosmopolitan London, Pankaj Mishra combines a powerful historical understanding of the contemporary world with psychological insight and a deep feeling for landscape. In Run and Hide, he has created an absolutely new kind of immigrant story-one in which achieving your wildest dreams might mean giving up everything, even once you return home

Nell Freudenberger

There is an arresting contrast in style between the political writings on which [Mishra's] reputation is chiefly built and the more introspective mode on display in his memoir and fiction. Those weaned on the gripping velocity and adamantine syntax of Mishra's essays may be surprised by the assiduous lucidity and serene poise of his new novel Run and Hide

The New Statesman

Mishra is a masterful eyewitness to the modern world, equally unafraid of nuance, earnestness and absurdity. [Run and Hide] is a slow, careful book about a fast and reckless world. This is not a destination novel; it is a journey novel. One well worth taking

San Francisco Chronicle

Mishra has a bit of Balzac in him-for instance, his belief that character reveals itself through surface detail, if that detail is observed ruthlessly enough . . . Run and Hide is a novel of modern India that takes some of the big-picture phenomena from Age of Anger and-as good social novels have always done-gets us to engage on the level of feeling by returning those abstractions to human scale

The New York Times Book Review

Mishra is a superb journalist, and the sensory vitality of his second novel is a reminder that fiction is the ultimate information compressor. Unleashed in the realm of human feeling, Mishra's keen observational powers are spectacularly alive

Jennifer Egan