
White Tears
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Lincoln Hoppe
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Danny Campbell
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Dominic Hoffman
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By:
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Hari Kunzru
About this listen
From one of the most talented fiction writers at work today: two ambitious young musicians are drawn into the dark underworld of blues record collecting, haunted by the ghosts of a repressive past.
Two 20-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous 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. 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.
©2017 Hari Kunzru (P)2017 Random House AudioCritic reviews
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What listeners say about White Tears
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- William
- 12-16-17
Finally picks up
The end of this book is great. To be honest it kind of bored me to tears the first 3/4. Going to change and was worth the boredom.
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- Kate Terrell
- 04-07-17
Great writing, incredibly long ending
I enjoyed the poetic and illustrative words building each sentence. I was gripped, until about 2/3rds through, the book was a painstaking commitment to finish.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Eileen Clark-Nagaoka
- 07-27-19
A little hard to follow
Hard to follow on audio. Changing narrators (in the story) made me want to be able to see the transitions in print in order to reread.
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- Y. J. Kim
- 08-06-18
This is a great book!
This is a great book to listen to. It was a very unique story. It definitely transend my experoence. I highly recommmeond it to anyone who is interested in cultural refeence and thriller of its own kind.
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- Marcus
- 03-28-17
Fantastic!
Great, could not put it down! it's incredible, fantastic yet more real than any other book I recently read. it's a story of race, culture and life in New York City you never heard before.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Stephanie C.
- 05-01-21
Future Past Participle
I will have always been in debt to this novel. As it has and does continuously give words to a silent history echoing through history. Revealing what will and always has been haunting me. Bring momentary clarity to the everlasting fog of now.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J Darryl Greenfield
- 03-11-18
An amazing and original tell of horror
Are you old enough to remember having to flip a record to the b-side? Discovering that while the a-side carried the hit single, it was the b-side that had the true magic? That is want Hari has done here. Weaving first a story of obsession and self absorption, transforming it into a horror tale of supernatural racial revenge.
I refuse to ruin this amazing story for potential readers. I will only say that it is an attentive and intelligent read. You can’t skim, and keep you eye on pronoun use. The evil is in the details and those details horrific.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-25-22
Riveting and disturbing
This isn't going to be an easy listen. You'll be scared and disturbed, first by the superbly crafted tension, then by a supernatural and nonlinear structure, send finallybby depictions of racial violence. But if you're serious about reconciling how the crimes of the past affect your seemingly innocent life here and now,you should piston to this book. It's unique and well-researched. You'll learn a lot about the Blues. You'll have a mirror to your white women's put up against you and if you let it, it'll make you question and break. This novel is about the ghosts of the past and a potential path to atonement for slavery and systemic racism.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Steve
- 04-22-23
Musicology-based horror, my new favourite subgenre
This was recommended as a brilliant companion piece to the second novella in John Horner Jacobs' A Lush & Seething Hell, and I'm so glad I found it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Truth Speaker
- 03-02-18
literary, intriguing, unique.
I am always searching for that unique hybrid of literature and a good yarn. This is a solid effort. Strong work.
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