White Tears

A feverish new tale from the bestselling author of The Impressionist

That summer I would ride my bike over the bridge, lock it up in front of one of the bars on Orchard Street and drift through the city on foot, recording. People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lovers’ quarrels, drug deals. I wanted to store the world and play it back just as I found it, without change or addition.

Two twenty-something New Yorkers: Seth, awkward and shy, and Carter, the trust fund hipster.

They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Rising fast on the New York producing scene, they stumble across an old blues song long forgotten by history -- and everything starts to unravel. Carter is drawn far down a path that allows no return, and Seth has no choice but to follow his friend into the darkness.

Trapped in a game they don't understand, Hari Kunzru's characters move unsteadily across the chessboard, caught between black and white, performer and audience, righteous and forsaken. But we have been here before, oh so many times over, and the game always ends the same way...

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.

'White Tears is a brave book, and often a very funny one' - Daily Telegraph

‘White Tears is a witty, strange and often very moving book.’ – FT

‘Brilliant. A nightmarish page-turner’ - The Sunday Telegraph
Recognised as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, Hari Kunzru is an author and journalist whose works include: The Impressionist (for which he won the Betty Trask Award and The Somerset Maugham Award), Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods without Men.