-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Hari Kunzru
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 seven novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, The Impressionist and Blue Ruin. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the "Easy Chair" column for Harper's Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.
Author Interview
Link to Hari Kunzru's Website
Name Pronunciation
Hari Kunzru: HAR-ee KUNE-zroo
If you liked My Revolutions, try these:
by Grant Ginder
Published 2023
From Grant Ginder, the author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes Let's Not Do That Again a poignant, funny, and slyly beguiling novel which proves that, like democracy, family is a messy and fragile thing - perfect for fans of Veep's biting humor, the family drama of Succession, and the joys of Kevin Wilson's Nothing to See Here.
by Jonathan Franzen
Published 2022
Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.
by Emma Straub
Published 2021
A warm, funny, and keenly perceptive novel about the life cycle of one family--as the kids become parents, grandchildren become teenagers, and a matriarch confronts the legacy of her mistakes. From the New York Times bestselling author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers.
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
