White Tears

by Hari Kunzru 288pp, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, ebook £8.99

Kunzru’s brilliant fifth novel is, at one level, a nightmarish page-turner, but it’s also a disorientating odyssey through decades of American history and a salutary lesson in what happens when art is hijacked for less than noble aims. Two white boys, one very rich, one a nerdish outsider, bond at college over their infatuation with black music: “more intense and authentic than anything made by white people”. It’s a brave book, and often very funny.