A new novel by Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist, Transmission) drops in the UK on Aug. 30. His first book not focused on Asians, My Revolutions takes on radical Left terrorism in ’70s Britain:

My Revolutions is his most daring move to date, because it is nothing like his previous work. Sombre, political and with not a single Asian character…. a contemporary story of a man slowly revealed to have a past as an extremist terrorist…

Without mentioning race, it is obliquely present in My Revolutions. Its tale of a boy becoming politicised to the extent that he can begin bombing high-profile London targets can be read… as a kind of parable about current… terrorism…

[Kunzru grew up] up in white 1980s Essex, with attitudes of Conservative politicians such as Norman Tebbit fuelling the racist abuse he endured…. “I had to run away from the Chingford Skins. I remember running for my life down a subway tunnel…” [Link]

One of the book’s theses is that terrorism is not some new condition which requires shredding civil rights:

It is possible, he says, that the middle-class Saudis who formed the nucleus of what became Al-Qaeda were just another kind of bearded revolutionary in the long history of radical insurgents. This in turn throws into question the idea of a “new” threat which needs “new” laws, and [criticizes] the sidelining of basic civil liberties. [Link]

As with Mohsin Hamid, Kunzru tackles a much more serious topic here than in his previous work:

… [His earlier novels] were broadly satirical, whereas My Revolutions is much graver in tone… [with] the taut, nervous energy of the thriller… The revolutions of the title are a pun… the idea of transformational overturning is parried against a futile circularity - the Parisian périphérique, the rotating restaurant on the Post Office Tower, Buddhists around a stupa and prisoners around the workyard. History repeats itself… [Link]

Kunzru… rejected the John Llewellyn Rhys prize because it was sponsored by The Mail on Sunday, a paper that, he believed, was hostile towards black and Asian British people. [Link]

Here’s a plot summary:

It’s the day before Mike Frame’s fiftieth birthday… He has a past that his partner Miranda and step-daughter Sam know nothing about, lived under another name amidst the turbulence of the revolutionary armed struggle of the 1970s… Now Mike is seeing ghosts… [and] can no longer ignore the contradiction between who he is and who he once was. [Link]