Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty and power, capital, art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. After graduating from art school in London, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career taking shape before him. That was not to happen. Now, undocumented in the United States, having survived Covid, he lives out of his car and barely makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. One day, as Jay attempts to make a delivery at a house surrounded by acres of woods, he is confronted by his destructive past: Alice, a former lover from his art school days, and the friend she left him for. Recognizing Jay’s dire circumstances, Alice invites him to stay on their property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting in motion a reckoning that has been decades in the making.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time, delivering an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.

REVIEWS

“That wild time [of youth] is brilliantly conjured throughout Blue Ruin in flashback scenes that seem to pulsate with the roar of drunken parties and the thump of dance music. . . . We are instantly swept along by the laconic grace and psychological acuity of Mr. Kunzru’s writing and by the commotion he unleashes at will and to great effect. . . . Indeed, Mr. Kunzru has drawn a narrator so appealing that we forgive him almost anything. In a novel where little happens, at least on the surface, and where the making and selling of art is examined at length, Jay’s odyssey also broadens a narrative that might otherwise have become fatally introspective or, worse still, pretentious. But Mr. Kunzru’s satirical eye, keen wit and compassionate intelligence guard against any such slide. Blue Ruin may end with the fate of a valuable painting hanging in the balance and millions of dollars about to vanish with a single drunken gunshot. By then, however, we care as little as Jay does about the fate of objects. Mr. Kunzru has made his point.”—Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal

“Blue Ruin is bracingly intelligent and often just plain beautiful. . . . The seamy, drug-crazed, millenarian atmosphere of the 90s British art world, with its intermingled idealism and cynicism, is brilliantly evoked . . . The use of artworks—a difficult trick in fiction—is especially impressive in Blue Ruin . . . [Blue Ruin is] a reminder that fiction, at its best, is a place to encounter new experiences and dwell in big ideas. Kunzru is known for ambitious novels that bring politics to rich, imaginative life; Blue Ruin shows him at the top of his game.”— Sandra Newman, The Guardian 

“Blue Ruin is a story about creative labor’s inevitable crash into politics, as well as the allure—and danger—of artistic monomania. . . . What ultimately distinguishes the novel is its searching quality, a greater open-endedness than [Kunzru’s White Tears or Red Pill]. . . . If the binaries Blue Ruin wrestles with—money versus art, action versus refusal—feel familiar, it’s because we are still so far from resolving them.”
—Jess Bergman, The New Republic

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Scribner UK
ISBN:  978-1398528949
Pages: 288