White Tears

[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

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