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Run and Hide: A Novel Audiobook
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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.
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“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.”
— Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author
Quotes
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“In the background of these three mates’ struggles to figure out what kind of men they are, India itself is cracking under the weight of its false promises.”
— New York Times -
“Run and Hide’s flashback narrative, which slowly reveals the story, is an impressive feat of craft.”
— Financial Times (London) -
“This is not a destination novel; it is a journey novel. One well worth taking.”
— San Francisco Chronicle -
“Narrator Mikhail Sen, a native Hindi speaker, brings out the musicality of Hindi speech, allowing listeners an authentic experience of the language.”
— Library Journal (audio review) -
“There is more than a whiff of The Great Gatsby.”
— Prospect (London) -
“Mishra splices a cautionary tale with elegant examination of globalization and the perils of the changing world order.”
— Daily Mail (London) -
“Examines rampant materialism and spiritual bankruptcy…An astute, discomfiting journey into a wasteland.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“A kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth―what it means on a human level, and what it costs.”
— Jennifer Egan, New York Times bestselling author
Awards
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A New York Times Pick of 14 Best New Books of the Month
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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A New Yorker Best Books of the Year Pick
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About Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger, and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and writes regularly for the London Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.