Product DescriptionA new novel by one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, a vivid and moving meditation on the rise of New India, the effects of globalization, and the crisis of masculinity that accompanies these rapidly changing conditions.Growing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His acceptance at 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 and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany―the recipients 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 on 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. And, when he is implicated in a terrible act of violence by his closest IIT friend, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become. Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra's intimate 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.Review"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"This powerful novel is a searing examination of our recent cultural and political trajectory, a surprising meditation on the role of the writer in times such as ours, a fragile love story, and an unforgiving look at where we are headed. It is, in other words, a book that demands to be read and rewards reading.”―Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West"A wonderfully rich portrait of friends bound by a childhood experience of deprivation, pursuing wildly different ambitions in India, Great Britain, and the United States. Pankaj Mishra writes with great intelligence and lyrical beauty about the perennial struggle for dignity and stability in a rapidly changing world―and how in this process identities are reinvented, reclaimed or renegotiated, sometimes with violent consequences." ―Laila Lalami, author of The Moor's Account"A profound, extraordinarily written, and devastating exploration of the ways the personal is always already the political, Run and Hide takes the temperature of the 'current moment' and gives us cogent, coherent answers for how we got here. Mishra has imbricated the individual, the primary subject of the novel form, in the dense forces of history and in the process created something new and unforgettable.’―Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others"Terrific . . . Elegantly written, incisively observed, and deeply satisfying to read."―Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire"Whether writing about a Himalayan village or cosmopolitan London, Pankaj Mishra combines a powerful historical understanding of the contemporary world with psychological insight and a deep feeling for landscape. In Run and Hide, he has created an absolutely new kind of immigrant story―one in which achieving your wildest dreams might mean giving up everything, even once you return home.