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  • Published: 28 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241977873
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $24.99

White Tears





A daring, compulsively readable novel that journeys into the dark history of modern America

Best friends Carter and Seth have just one thing in common: music. After college they move to New York and begin selling old jazz and blues records to the new generation of music fans, ripping off black culture to line white pockets. Until one day they walk into trouble - a lost song resurfaces which contains the power to ruin them both. First Carter then Seth is sucked into a vortex of violence and vengeance, as forces they don't understand conspire to teach these white boys a lesson.

This is a nail-biting ride through the terrifying ghosts of America's past. It's about cultural appropriation, black lives and white privilege. And it is about the music that runs through the country's veins like blood.

  • Published: 28 May 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241977873
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru is the author of The Impressionist, Transmission and the short story collection Noise, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, 2003. He is a contributing editor of Mute magazine and sits on the executive council of English Pen. He lives in East London.

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Praise for White Tears

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

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

Marvellous, original and intelligent. Kunzru writes like a master storyteller... There's simply nothing [he] couldn't manage in prose

Literary Review

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

Compulsively readable, masterly - a tour de force

Rachel Kushner

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
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