Hari Kunzru

Having adopted an alias, Michael Frame, the character at the center of My Revolutions is living a carefully constructed life of suburban mediocrity, hiding his radical history from a capitalist career wife and a stepchild who dreams of nothing more romantic than a gig as a corporate lawyer. As always seems to happen in such stories—whether in real life or fiction—ghosts come calling and Frame is dragged back into the past. That’s admittedly a tired premise, but Kunzru—one of Granta’s “Twenty Best Fiction Writers Under Forty”—has a pretty good track record at making something stylish and memorable out of unpromising material. His previous novels, The Impressionist and Transmission, seemed like cool, logical outgrowths from his work at Mute Magazine, a nifty British rag that focuses on the exploration of globalization and “network societies.” From the sound of things, My Revolutions is a sort of ambitious departure, and a meditation on the fluidity of time, identity, ideology, and necessity.