My Revolutions
A Novel
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Powerful” (The New Yorker), “extraordinary” (The New York Times Book Review), and “brilliant” (Entertainment Weekly)—you won’t be able to put down this novel by the award-winning bestselling author of White Tears and Blue Ruin
Critics have compared him to Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Tom Wolfe, and Don DeLillo. Granta dubbed him “one of the twenty best fiction writers under forty.” In My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru delivers his best novel yet.
Chris Carver is living a lie. His wife, their teenage daughter, and everyone in their circle know him as Michael Frame, suburban dad. They have no idea that as a radical student during the sixties, he briefly became a terrorist, protesting the Vietnam War by setting off bombs. Until one day a ghost from his past turns up on his doorstep, forcing Chris on the run.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simon Prebble, a consummate professional among narrators, plays Kunzru's middle-aged protagonist, who relates his adolescent-into-adulthood journey that has gradually brought him to his current state of misery. From the outset Prebble helps structure the kind of suspense and tension Kunzru created so superbly in The Impressionist. The story opens at Christopher's 50th birthday party. But he is no longer Christopher; "Michael Frame" now leads a yuppie suburban family life he describes meticulously and with witty, bitter irony. He exists in a sort of "mental crouch," waiting, knowing that "even now, in days, or even hours, my life here will be over." Initiated as a 1960s teen into a counterculture, anti-Vietnam, anti-imperialist commune, he falls for the gutsy, freewheeling Anna. Wanting to win her, he ends up blowing up bathrooms and buildings. But he is forever dogged by a creepy childhood acquaintance named Miles, who, in the end, blackmails him into working for the people he always bitterly opposed. Kunzru's descriptions of places and events are sometimes too long and Christopher's lifetime attachment to Anna is a bit hard to swallow. But Kunzru delivers a gripping tale. Simultaneous release with the Dutton hardcover.
