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  • Published: 20 March 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241977880
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

White Tears





A darkly compulsive story about records and race, music and murder, from the author of The Impressionist

Carter and Seth are worlds apart - one a trust fund hipster, the other a suburban nobody - and yet they are united by a love of music. Rising fast on the New York scene, one day they stumble across an old blues song long forgotten by history - and everything starts to unravel. Carter quickly becomes obsessed with the unknown singer, drawn down a path that allows no return, and Seth has no choice but to follow his friend into the darkness.

Trapped in a game he doesn't understand, Seth plays the same cards that have been played before, says the lines exactly as they have always been spoken, acts the old familiar parts as if for the first time. He moves unsteadily across a chessboard of white and black, performer and audience, righteous and forsaken, caught between the man who makes the music and the one who calls the tune. But we have been here before, oh so many times over, and the game always ends the same way . . .

  • Published: 20 March 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241977880
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

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.

Also by Hari Kunzru

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Praise for White Tears

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
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