White Tears

A Novel

By: Hari Kunzru

Narrated by: Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell, Dominic Hoffman

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

From one of the most talented fiction writers at work today: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into the dark underworld of blues record collecting, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past.

Two 20-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.

©2017 Hari Kunzru (P)2017 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Kunzru has done his homework on racial history and white privilege, but the novel is also lifted on his sharp descriptions of music, which he makes so concrete and delectable you understand why his misguided, ill-fated heroes fall so hard for it. A well-turned and innovative tale that cannily connects old-time blues and modern-day minstrelsy." ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

"A compulsively readable ghost story that features masterly - tour de force - writing about early American blues." (Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers)

" White Tears is a hallucinatory and eerily accurate journey into America's racial unconscious - like an updated version of The Crying of Lot 49, in which race itself is the secret and arcane system that controls all of us in ways we never fully understand. In an era when the past seems to be collapsing into the present on a daily basis, you couldn't find a more urgently necessary, compulsively readable book." (Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine)

"Kunzru's latest offers a fascinating intermingling of the mistreatment of black Americans, immorality in the music field, and magical realism - all delivered by three talented narrators, Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell, and Dominic Hoffman.... Hoppe, Campbell, and Hoffman perform this engrossing, convoluted tale with all its serious implications intact." ( AudioFile)

Finally picks up

The end of this book is great. To be honest it kind of bored me to tears the first 3/4. Going to change and was worth the boredom.

Great writing, incredibly long ending

I enjoyed the poetic and illustrative words building each sentence. I was gripped, until about 2/3rds through, the book was a painstaking commitment to finish.

A little hard to follow

Hard to follow on audio. Changing narrators (in the story) made me want to be able to see the transitions in print in order to reread.

This is a great book!

This is a great book to listen to. It was a very unique story. It definitely transend my experoence. I highly recommmeond it to anyone who is interested in cultural refeence and thriller of its own kind.

Fantastic!

Great, could not put it down! it's incredible, fantastic yet more real than any other book I recently read. it's a story of race, culture and life in New York City you never heard before.

Future Past Participle

I will have always been in debt to this novel. As it has and does continuously give words to a silent history echoing through history. Revealing what will and always has been haunting me. Bring momentary clarity to the everlasting fog of now.

An amazing and original tell of horror

Are you old enough to remember having to flip a record to the b-side? Discovering that while the a-side carried the hit single, it was the b-side that had the true magic? That is want Hari has done here. Weaving first a story of obsession and self absorption, transforming it into a horror tale of supernatural racial revenge.

I refuse to ruin this amazing story for potential readers. I will only say that it is an attentive and intelligent read. You can’t skim, and keep you eye on pronoun use. The evil is in the details and those details horrific.

Riveting and disturbing

This isn't going to be an easy listen. You'll be scared and disturbed, first by the superbly crafted tension, then by a supernatural and nonlinear structure, send finallybby depictions of racial violence. But if you're serious about reconciling how the crimes of the past affect your seemingly innocent life here and now,you should piston to this book. It's unique and well-researched. You'll learn a lot about the Blues. You'll have a mirror to your white women's put up against you and if you let it, it'll make you question and break. This novel is about the ghosts of the past and a potential path to atonement for slavery and systemic racism.

Musicology-based horror, my new favourite subgenre

This was recommended as a brilliant companion piece to the second novella in John Horner Jacobs' A Lush & Seething Hell, and I'm so glad I found it.

literary, intriguing, unique.

I am always searching for that unique hybrid of literature and a good yarn. This is a solid effort. Strong work.