Hari Kunzru Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru, born in London, is a British journalist and novelist. He is of mixed Kashmiri Pandit and English ancestry, and grew up in Essex.

Hari studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University, then he gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from Warwick University.

He was named as one of Granta’s “20 Best Fiction Writers Under 40” and “The Impressionist” was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and a British Book Award. It was also one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Novels of the year 2002.

Hari has written for a variety of English and international publications, which include Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Wired, and The London Review of Books.

Hari’s debut novel, called “The Impressionist”, was released in the year 2002. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

“The Impressionist” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2002. In Hari’s dazzling first book, he exhibits an uncommon mastery of both subject and language. Pran Nath Razdan, is a half-English and half-Indian boy, who has been disowned by his high-caste family when they learn the truth about his parentage. Accustomed to the living in the lap of luxury and being woefully unqualified to take care of himself, he is now fully alone and forced to reinvent himself in his own struggle to just survive.

Pran, desperate to get food, has got one thing of value: his highly sought-after light skin, and finds himself a hostage in a brothel, clothed in women’s garb, being drugged, and forced to assume the role of a sacrificial pawn in a game between empire and colony. However both factions self-destruct in a stupendously colorful way, and he’s able to escape to Bombay, where he assumes a double life both as Robert, the obedient foster kid of some eccentric Scottish missionary and his wife. And that of Pretty Bobby, an errand boy for the sex shops in the city’s rather infamous Falkland Road.

One night, when he witnesses a murder of one young Englishman going to return to his homeland to get a proper education and claim his inheritance, the quick theft of the victim’s own passport and boat tickets. This buys Pran one more identity in a country he’s ready to make his own. What it means to be white or black, and the need to find a place where somebody truly belongs.

“Transmission” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2004. In this networked world, anything can change in a single instant, and sometimes it does. This is a new novel of lunacy and love, immunity and immigration. It introduces a daydreaming Indian computer geek whose luxurious fantasies of life in America get shaken when he takes a job in California.

Arjun Mehta, naive and lonely, bides his time as a lowly assistant virus tester, pining for Christine, his free-spirited colleague. Despite building some digital creatures in a feeble effort to enhance his own job security, he gets laid off like so many of his Silicon Valley peers. In an act of desperation to keep his own job, he releases a destructive yet mischievous virus on a global scale which has some major unintended consequences.

While world order continues to unravel, so does his very sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm which reaches all the way to Bollywood and, not so coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun’s very favorite Indian film.

Kunzru takes an ultra-contemporary turn in a playful, stylish, and wicked exploration of life at the click of a mouse with precision.

“My Revolutions” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2007. It is the day before Mike Frame turns fifty and his peaceful provincial life suddenly falls apart around him. But maybe none of that matters, since it is not his life to begin with. He’s got a past that his partner (Miranda) and step daughter (Sam) don’t know anything about, living under the name amidst all the turbulence of the revolutionary armed struggle of the seventies.

Mike now sees ghosts, an old friend that wants to reminisce and a dead former lover. Miranda, who formerly spoke about alternative lifestyles with an emphasis on alternative, rather than lifestyles, reinvents herself as a thrusting nineties businesswoman.

Mike’s no longer able to ignore the contradiction between who he used to be and who he now is. Which side was he actually on back then? And which side is he on at this point?

This novel, which is moving, passionate, gripping, and provocative brings to brilliant life both the radical idealism of the post-’68 generation darker currents that ran underneath it. As well as the eddies of which are still shaping our history to this very day.

“Gods Without Men” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2011. The California desert in the year 2008. Raj Matharu, a four year old, vanishes in the wilderness, plunging his wealthy New York parents into the surreal public hell that comes with a media witch hunt. However the desert is miraculous and inexplicable, and the Matharus’ fate is now bound up with that of some others.

One is an ex-member of an extraterrestrial worshiping cult (who’s now middle aged yet still haunted by transcendent callings), a debauched rock star (on the run from the sordid excesses of his life and a failed relationship), and a teen Iraqi refugee (that befriends a young black Marine while playing “Iraqi villager” in a military simulation exercise).

Their lives converge in a strange, isolated town, close to a rock formation which is known as The Pinnacles, and among all of these tangled stories and echoes of all those that have traveled before them through this savagely powerful landscape.

This is a multilayered and branching novel by one of our most acclaimed authors, and is a compulsively readable journey into the turns and twists of a handful of human lives. Hari delivers a novel that is a heartfelt exploration of our search for meaning and pattern in a chaotic and random universe.