About the Author

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men, and the story collection Noise. He lives in New York and his next novel, White Tears, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in spring 2017.

Reviews

A beautifully written echo chamber of a novel
*David Mitchell*

Kunzru's engagingly wired prose and agile plotting sweep all before them
*New Yorker*

One of the most talented writers of his generation
*Image*

Kunzru's prose sashays across the page with all the fluid flamboyance of a dance
*The Times*

Pitch-perfect masterwork
*Publishers Weekly*

Kunzru just gets better and better. This fourth novel is an astonishing tour de force
*Kirkus*

The literary skills of Hari Kunzru are evident throughout this complex and disturbing novel . . . beautifully constructed sentences . . . A briliant crossover literary feat
*Financial Times*

A funny, beautifully observed novel that raises big questions about how far events and people, past and present, are connected. But for all the big ideas, it is also surprisingly moving
*Psychologies Magazine*

With each novel, Hari Kunzru is proving himself a subtler and more ingenious writer . . . his most ambitious work yet
*Scotland on Sunday*

Dizzying scope . . . It is a testament to Kunzru's ability as a writer that Gods Without Men presents so many characters sketched so vividly
*New Statesman*

A fine writer with an enviably fertile imagination
*Telegraph*

Refreshingly uncompromising
*Prospect*

As characters in acclaimed British novelist Kunzru's pitch-perfect masterwork tinker with machines for communicating with an interplanetary craft circling the Earth, their desperate quest for meaning is interrupted by a nonlinear melange of other strange endeavors that span centuries and cross the Mojave Desert: British rocker Nicky Capaldi's escape from L.A. in a convertible with a gold-plated Israeli handgun stowed in the glove box; beleaguered parents Jaz and Lisa Matharu's disastrous vacation with their autistic four-year-old, Raj; former hippie commune "Guide" Judy's return to the desert, strung out on meth; and traumatized Iraqi teen Laila's participation as an actor in U.S. army war game facsimiles of Iraq. Presiding over it all are the Pinnacles, three fingers of rock that bear mute witness to Raj's disappearance and the ensuing frantic search. Also on board are Fray Francisco Hermenegildo Tomas Garces, a half-mad Jesuit missionary intent on converting Native Americans at the close of the 18th century; Deighton, a disfigured ethnologist, annoyed by the young, "half-educated" Eliza's failure to recognize "the distinction he'd conferred on her by asking her to be his wife"; an aircraft mechanic named Schmidt working in the '40s who feels betrayed by what the Enola Gay unleashed over Hiroshima; a working-class mother seduced by the possibility of fellowship with benevolent otherworldly beings; and a local girl who once lived with the hippies and who-even though she returns years later to run the motel where Nicky, Jaz, Lisa, and Raj briefly stay-suspects she has never quite returned. Kunzru's (My Revolutions) ear for colloquial speech creates a cacophony that overlays his affectionate descriptions of the desolate landscape, creating a powerful effect akin to the distant cry of urgent voices crackling up and down the dial on a lonely drive through an American wasteland. Agent: Melissa Pimentel, Curtis Brown. (Mar. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In 2008, Jaswinder (Jaz) Singh Matharu, MIT grad and the rebellious Baltimore-bred son of a Punjabi family, heads to the Southwest with Jewish American wife Lisa and autistic son Raj. Along with drug-hazed London rocker Nicky Capaldi, to whom Raj takes a shine, they find themselves stuck (and coming unstuck) at a motel in a beautifully barren area where, we learn in multiple date-marked chapters, Fray Garces managed a mission (1778), Mormons murdered intruders (1871), the disaffected Schmidt seems to have seen a spaceship (1947), a community believing in extra-terrestrials gathered (1958), a hippie commune emerged (1969), and, significantly, an ethnologist studying the disappearing Natives saw an Indian man walking with a ghostly white child (1920). Woven throughout is the tale of Coyote, who risks all to visit the Land of the Dead, and as time collapses and the multiple stories coalesce, Raj disappears. VERDICT At first somewhat slow as the various stories are laid out, this extraordinary novel by the estimable Kunzru (My Revolutions) gathers momentum, power, and a fierce clarity to deliver a rich panorama while detailing our mutual antagonisms and deepest spiritual needs (met, perhaps, with "a vast emptiness, an absence"). Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/11/11.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.