Run and Hide - Hardcover

Mishra, Pankaj

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374607524 ISBN 13: 9780374607524

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2022

Synopsis

"Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man’s humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth—what it means on a human level, and what it costs. Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction." —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach

Growing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His acceptance to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, enabled through great sacrifice by his low-caste parents, is seemingly his golden ticket out of a life plagued by everyday cruelties and deprivations.

At the predominantly male campus, he meets two students from similar backgrounds. Unlike Arun—scarred by his childhood, and an uneasy interloper among go-getters—they possess the sheer will and confidence to break through merciless social barriers. The alumni of IIT eventually go on to become the financial wizards of their generation, working hard and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany—the beneficiaries of unprecedented financial and sexual freedom. But while his friends play out Gatsby-style fantasies, Arun fails to leverage his elite education for social capital. He decides to pursue the writerly life, retreating to a small village in the Himalayas with his aging mother.

Arun’s modest idyll is one day disrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Alia, who is writing an exposé of his former classmates. Alia, beautiful and sophisticated, draws Arun back to the prospering world where he must be someone else if he is to belong. When he is implicated in a terrible act of violence committed by his closest friend from IIT, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become.

Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra’s powerful story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and gender that map onto our most intimate relationships.

About this title

About the Author

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics, which won the Art Seidenbaum Award; Bland Fanatics; Age of Anger; and From the Ruins of Empire. He contributes political and literary essays to The Guardian, the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London and India.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374607524
• ISBN 13: 9780374607524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 327