White Tears

A Novel

By: Hari Kunzru

Narrated by: Lincoln Hoppe, Danny Campbell, Dominic Hoffman

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)