Run And Hide

Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man's humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth - what it means on a human level, and what it costs. Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction

In his first novel in more than 20 years, acclaimed essayist Mishra splices a cautionary tale with elegant examination of globalisation and the perils of the changing world order. Immensely thought-provoking

The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you'd expect... As an exuberant chronicle of a late capitalist world fatally mediated by Twitter and Instagram, Run and Hide might be the most zeitgeisty novel you could read

A wonderfully rich and enjoyable novel . . . a work for our time and one that will surely be read many years on for what will then be its historical interest . . . a novel built to last

A lyrical letter from the new India...a profoundly literary voice, as interested in how to write about a subject as the subject itself

Terrific . . . elegantly written, incisively observed, and deeply satisfying to read

This powerful novel is a searing examination of our recent cultural and political trajectory, a surprising meditation on the role of the writer in times such as ours, a fragile love story, and an unforgiving look at where we are headed. It is, in other words, a book that demands to be read and rewards reading

The changing forms of his writing, always straining to encompass the chaotic reality Mishra sees around himself, reveal him to be a profoundly literary voice, as interested in how to write about a subject as the subject itself...After the density of his recent books, with their weighty bibliographies, Mishra's fictional prose is permitted, once again, to take lyrical flight

Pankaj Mishra returns to fiction after two decades with a gripping and remarkable novel - his best work yet. It captures the trajectory of our time through insights and moments that are startling, pure, and have a strange inevitability

A profound, extraordinarily written, and devastating exploration of the ways the personal is always already the political. Unforgettable

Pankaj Mishra writes with great intelligence and lyrical beauty about the perennial struggle for dignity and stability in a rapidly changing world - and how, in this process, identities are reinvented, reclaimed or renegotiated

Pankaj Mishra kept us waiting 20 years for a new novel, and it becomes apparent, as soon as you pick up Run and Hide, that time has honed one of our greatest writing talents. The narrative draws you in more keenly than any boxset and the prose shimmers with wisdom. Marvellous

Run and Hide is achingly irresistible and terrifyingly bracing - like seeing yourself or your world, without illusion, for the first time. It is the coup de literature our demented age needs from one of the finest, bravest writers we have

I was left hoping I won't have to wait another 20 years for Mishra's next novel

Run and Hide, is an exciting follow-up to his 1999 debut, The Romantics . . . Mishra brings to bear both the high style of his fiction and the clarity of his criticism for an affecting, world-spanning story about capitalism, art, and globalization

Vulture, 49 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2022

Run and Hide is savage and tender, and shockingly spiritual. This book may not change your life but it'll entertain the hell out of you

There is tragedy when a spurned and forsaken world turns out to be a paradise in disguise, and when it calls its children home, the children are too unmoored, too compromised to return. That is the monumental, ultra-modern drama Pankaj Mishra unfolds in Run and Hide, a novel of devastating loss and moral collapse worthy of Henry James

An intense, probing novel examines rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy

Mishra offers a deeply critical portrait of what he terms the 'IIT generation' of educated Indians who made their fortunes in a rapidly changing India and globalizing world and of the personal and social costs of those changes . . . A vivid, multifaceted study

Indian author Pankaj Mishra has dedicated his career to analyzing the psychology of Asia's rising masses, particularly its young men. His latest work, a novel, Run and Hide, is his most searing look at the subject yet

A beautifully written novel that captures the complexities and challenges of growing up in India and the simultaneous struggle to find meaning and a way forward in life

There is more than a whiff of The Great Gatsby . . . Mishra's satire recalls Tom Wolfe or Bret Easton Ellis

Whether writing about a Himalayan village or cosmopolitan London, Pankaj Mishra combines a powerful historical understanding of the contemporary world with psychological insight and a deep feeling for landscape. In Run and Hide, he has created an absolutely new kind of immigrant story-one in which achieving your wildest dreams might mean giving up everything, even once you return home

There is an arresting contrast in style between the political writings on which [Mishra's] reputation is chiefly built and the more introspective mode on display in his memoir and fiction. Those weaned on the gripping velocity and adamantine syntax of Mishra's essays may be surprised by the assiduous lucidity and serene poise of his new novel Run and Hide

Mishra is a masterful eyewitness to the modern world, equally unafraid of nuance, earnestness and absurdity. [Run and Hide] is a slow, careful book about a fast and reckless world. This is not a destination novel; it is a journey novel. One well worth taking

Mishra has a bit of Balzac in him-for instance, his belief that character reveals itself through surface detail, if that detail is observed ruthlessly enough . . . Run and Hide is a novel of modern India that takes some of the big-picture phenomena from Age of Anger and-as good social novels have always done-gets us to engage on the level of feeling by returning those abstractions to human scale

Mishra is a superb journalist, and the sensory vitality of his second novel is a reminder that fiction is the ultimate information compressor. Unleashed in the realm of human feeling, Mishra's keen observational powers are spectacularly alive

Pankaj Mishra's books include The Romantics, which won the LA Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for fiction, Age of Anger and From the Ruins of Empire. He contributes political and literary essays to the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.

FROM THE AWARD WINNING AUTHOR OF AGE OF ANGER COMES A GATSBY-ESQUE TALE OF WEALTH AND AMBITION 
 
'A book that demands to be read' MOHSIN HAMID 
 
'Terrific . . . deeply satisfying to read' KAMILA SHAMSIE 
 
Arun and his two classmates, Aseem and Virendra, are the success stories of their generation. As graduates of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, they have smashed social barriers and played-out Gatsby-style fantasies across the globe. 
 
Run and Hide is a lyrical and piercing story of morality, materialism and upheaval in an every-changing world. 
 
'Sharp, provocative and engaging . . . Run and Hide might be the most zeitgeisty novel you could read' SPECTATOR 
 
'One of the finest, bravest writers we have' JUNOT DIAZ 
 
'It'll entertain the hell out of you' MOHAMMED HANIF 
 
'A novel of loss and moral collapse worthy of Henry James' JOSHUA FERRIS

The Romantics

The Romantics looks to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, to E.M. Forster, to Turgenev. But it is the product of a distinctive and sharp intelligence

A sensitive and introspective novel . . . a meditation on hope and failure. Mishra's evocations of Indian landscape and customs are vivid and thoughtful; his prose clean and unhampered and his descriptive passages to be savoured

Contemporary India is brought to vigorous, thrumming life in the pages of The Romantics

If you buy one literary novel this year, make sure it's this

[A]n intriguing combination of casual grace and emotional intensity, peppered with discreet social comment on caste, class, sectarian strife, the state of the nation . . . a charming debut

A work of art, a first novel of the highest achievement...a writer whose work will last. Read it and find yourself at the source of something great

[An] extraordinary debut novel . . . a supernova

Mishra's lyrical descriptions . . . and the depth of culture the region offers, is a haunting reminder of India's power to bewitch

Grip[s] the reader as artfully and as compellingly as the first page of A Passage to India

If much of cosmopolitan Indian writing has valorized the immigrant and the foreign land, then The Romantics is a celebration of the home and its forgotten world

A voice that fuses the lapidary precision of Flaubert with the meditative lyricism of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, a voice that's alternately wry and ruminative, meticulous and expansive

Pankaj Mishra writes the most perfect prose of any Indian novelist of his generation

Mishra's eye is sharp, his prose flawless

[A] surprisingly assured, provocatively balanced meditation on the familiar culture flash

A truly ambitious attempt to compare the way people in the East and the West dream . . . Delicate and subtly tantalising in the way only a book can really be

It is almost as if when everyone is flashing De Beers diamonds, Mishra traps the quiet luminescence of the moonstone in his theme and style

Mishra's writing has a lovely potency . . . subtly layered and compelling

Impressive . . . The Romantics turns its back on the exotic richness and the "teeming" panoramic quality which we readily assume to be expressive of Indianness itself

A first novel whose achievement is something that most writers could be proud of at any stage in their careers

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
'If you buy one literary novel this year, make sure it's this' THE TIMES 
'The Romantics looks to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, to E.M. Forster, to Turgenev. But it is the product of a distinctive and sharp intelligence' HILARY MANTEL 
'Grips the reader as artfully and as compellingly as the first page of A Passage to India' THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 
 
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION 
 
1989. In the holy city of Varanasi, 19-year-old Samar rents a room to avoid a small-town job and lose himself in reading about worlds outside of India. But when he is thrust into local a circle of privileged European and American expats, led by the charismatic Miss West, Samar will soon face his own silent desires and crumbling beliefs. 
 
'A work of art' Financial Times 
'A supernova' The Washington Post 
'A charming debut' The Independent

Pankaj Mishra

The World After Gaza . . . is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year

A book of passion, fury and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation

A seething and erudite indictment of the west’s role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it

This is a rare text: courageous and bracing, learned and ethical, rigorous and mind-expanding

As scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, it’s by a long way the saddest and most thought-provoking book I have read this year

Stimulating and brilliantly researched

In this urgent book, Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Mishra reflects on the supposedly universal consensus that emerged from the Holocaust, as well as his own early sympathies for Israel, as he expounds on the terrible toll of this passivity in the face of atrocity

This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the centre of this book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza

An impassioned account . . . Richly researched . . . Riveting

If books have a role today in the elucidation of justice, then I believe The World after Gaza will prove to be as crucial to our own times as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was to his

A brilliant book, as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another's pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, colour and religion

We all owe Pankaj Mishra a debt for crafting eloquent, urgent and undeniable words from the horrors we are struggling to witness

An astute, humane and necessary intervention, opening a path to the altered consciousness which has to be a consequence of Israel’s war on Gaza

Pankaj Mishra remembers the future. The World After Gaza, with its elegant outrage and eloquent ache, will be the reference for those who judge our times tomorrow. Thanks to Mishra's all-too-human work, the next generation will know we were not all in vain

Both a timeless and timely book, reading The World After Gaza feels like engaging in an ongoing conversation about the meaning of the Holocaust and colonialism with a good attentive friend’

Eyal Weizman, Director, Forensic Architecture

Pankaj Mishra is our globally leading public intellectual and his coruscating and scintillating meditation on the ethical purchase of Holocaust memory as the Gaza war goes on is one of the indispensable documents of civilisation in a barbaric time. With his alert conscience, impeccable learning and meditative writing, Mishra chronicles how the very attempt to register the crimes of the past in a world of continuing hierarchy can transform into an alibi for the disasters of the present

With clarity and even a dose of self-reflection, the always brilliant Pankaj Mishra sifts through the many implications of the horrid war on Gaza

An insightful and persuasive analysis

[Mishra’s] insistence that what’s happening in the Middle East is not remote and not something about which we can figure out the whys and wherefores at a later date that Mishra makes his most powerful arguments… this is brave writing that demands to be read

Memory of the Holocaust, the ultimate atrocity of Europe’s civil wars and the paradigmatic genocide, has shaped the Western political and moral imagination in the postwar era. Fears of its recurrence have been routinely invoked to justify Israel’s policies against Palestinians. But for most people around the world – the ‘darker peoples’, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s words – the main historical memory is of the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism, and the central event of the twentieth century is decolonisation – freedom from the white man’s world. 
 
The World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism, and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the global majority's frequently thwarted vision of racial equality. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting and a long-dominant Western minority no longer commands the same authority and credibility, it is critically important to enter the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population. 
 
As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis – about whether some lives matter more than others, why identity politics built around memories of suffering is being widely embraced and why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present and future.

Pankaj Mishra

Praise for The World After Gaza

The World After Gaza . . . is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year

A book of passion, fury and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation

A seething and erudite indictment of the west’s role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it

The World After Gaza . . . is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year

A book of passion, fury and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation

A seething and erudite indictment of the west’s role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it

The World After Gaza . . . is as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. By a long way the most horrifying and thought-provoking book I have read this year

A book of passion, fury and clarity. Mishra is one of the most important voices of our generation

A seething and erudite indictment of the west’s role in the creation of Israel and everything that has flowed from it

Books by Pankaj Mishra

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