Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2008
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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 in the sixties he briefly became a terrorist—protesting the Vietnam War by setting bombs around London. And then one day a ghost from his past turns up on his doorstep, forcing Chris on the run.
As Chris flees, he remembers his days as an isolated youth, hopelessly in love with Anna Addison, following her as she threw aside conventionality. Chris’s rival for Anna’s affections, the charismatic Sean Ward, was the leader of the radical August 14th Group. Egging one another on, the three inched closer and closer to the edge, until the events of one horrifying night forced them apart, never to see one another again.
"Political fiction sometimes works best when it is less greedy for history, like Alan Hollinghurst's The Line Of Beauty and David Peace's GB84, with their teeming microscope slides of Thatcherite and anti-Thatcherite life at a particular stage of the 80s. And sometimes it works best when the story and its moral are kept slightly opaque, as in Joan Didion's poker-faced and whispering political novels, rather than crisply spelled out, as they tend to be here." - The Guardian.
"This is a beautifully constructed piece of storytelling. Kunzru seamlessly switches back and forth between two parallel narratives - the first of Carver's radical past, the second of his increasingly desperate attempts to prevent it catching up with him - ratcheting up the tension in taut, hard-edged prose." - The Telegraph.
"Kunzru's most accomplished work so far: the sound of an important novelist in the first bloom of maturity." - The Independent.
"Kunzru shifts between these narratives with considerable technical skill, but overall My Revolutions gives the unfortunate impression of a talented writer who has lost his bearings and lost sight of why he is telling this particular story." - The Times.
"The straightforward skill with which Kunzru conjures the London world in which Chris Carver came of age is in this sense both the book's strength and weakness. Everyone in Notting Hill is in a Solidarity Front or a Liberation Caucus, 'fancy names ... [for] young men who gave out leaflets outside the tube station and faced down the local mods'. But although there is quiet comedy in some of this, Frame - and apparently the author - is overly keen to present it as the moment when the class war was lost, when Britain began its love affair with bread and circuses." - The Observer.
"Starred Review. Kunzru creates a graphic and realistic portrait of the 1960s and beyond. Exciting, dramatic, and enthralling; recommended for all collections." - Library Journal.
This information about My Revolutions was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hari Kunzru is the author of five previous novels: White Tears, The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, and Gods Without Men. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Author Interview
Link to Hari Kunzru's Website
Name Pronunciation
Hari Kunzru: HAR-ee KUNE-zroo
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