White Tears

Ghost story, murder mystery, love letter to American music - White Tears is all of this and more, a thrilling investigation of race and appropriation in society today.

"Record collecting turns dangerous in a smart, time-bending tale about cultural appropriation. A well-turned and innovative tale that cannily connects old-time blues and modern-day minstrelsy."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is glamorous and the heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long-lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. 

When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.

"Kunzru’s graceful writing is exquisitely attuned to his material. Seth’s integrity as a narrator is so convincing that at first the frequent jumps into an uncannily familiar past feel like a counterpoint melody that will resolve by the last page. But it’s neither a clever Time and Again story of time travel nor a tricky Westworld sort of past-present parallel. White Tears is a profoundly darker and more complex story of a haunting that elucidates the iniquitous history of white appropriation of black culture."  -  Katharine Weber, The Washington Post

White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.