Red Pill

Description

'The book I wish I'd written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next' Aravind Adiga 'Astonishing, absorbing, terrifying. Immensely good.' Philip Pullman ''Red Pill stands as a final blast of sanity against this new, deranged reality. It is a literary masterpiece for a barbaric new world rapidly running out of room for literary masterpieces.' The Spectator '[A] deeply intelligent and artfully constructed novel.' Financial Times From the author of White Tears comes a breathtaking, state-of-the-world novel about one man's struggle to defend his values and create a reality free from the shadows of the past. 'From now on when you see something, you're seeing it because I want you to see it. When you think of something, it'll be because I want you to think about it...' And with those words, the obsession begins. A writer has left his family in Brooklyn for a three month residency at the Deuter Centre in Berlin, hoping for undisturbed days devoted to artistic absorption. When nothing goes according to plan, he finds himself holed up in his room watching Blue Lives, a violent cop show with a bleak and merciless worldview. One night at a party he meets Anton, the charismatic creator of the show, and strikes up a conversation. It is a conversation that leads him on a journey into the heart of moral darkness. A conversation thatthreatens to destroy everything he holds most dear, including his own mind. Red Pill is a novel about the alt-right, online culture, creativity, sanity and history. It tells the story of the 21st century through the prism of the centuries that preceded it, showing how the darkest chapters of our past haunt our present. More than anything, though, this is a novel about love and how it can endure in a world where everything else seems to have lost all meaning. Praise for White Tears 'Exquisitely attuned' Washington Post 'Electrifying, subversive and wildly original' TheNew Yorker 'A book that everyone should be reading right now' TIME Magazine 'Haunting, doom-drenched, genuinely and viscerally disturbing...' The Independent

'This is a tense, absorbing tale of paranoia and dislocation, madness and obsession' Economist 'Kunzru is a consummate storyteller and has composed one of this year's coolest, but quietly menacing, novels' New Statesman 'A stylish examination of the far right culture and the roots of our contemporary chaos' Guardian 'Red Pill is a novel designed for us to parse, to scour for clues [...] We are treated to snatches of post-Kantian philosophy, narrative echoes of Kleist's work, coincidences and wordplay' Times Literary Supplement 'This unstable hallucination of a novel is bleakly persuasive on modern liberal complacency sleepwalking into horror' Daily Mail 'A brilliant, nuanced and sometimes satirical dramatization of liberal meltdown in the age of Trump' Daily Telegraph 'Kunzru's prose is often skilful' - The Sunday Times 'A cracker' - Independent 'A meta-critique of the coarsening effect of online culture on our language' - Literary Review 'A kind of male midlife crisis novel, unpredictably framed around the legacy of historical violence, it spins a buzzy apocalyptic thriller from zeitgeisty concerns about information overload, online surveillance and the rise of the alt-right' Metro