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Book cover of Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin

Hari Kunzru

21
Coup de coeur
Coup de coeur (Literature), by Adam
During the pandemic Jay, a middle-aged delivery driver, drops off a grocery order to an isolated estate in rural New York, only to run into Alice, his girlfriend from several decades earlierwhen he was a Young British Artist, and when his mind was awhirl with hard drugs and even harder theory. This reunion sends Jay back to London in the 90s, to reckon again with that last decade of the 20th-century when every element of human life finally became commodified. Blue Ruin is a deeply unsettling, and intensely thought provoking reflection on the impact capital has on people, on art, and those who create it.
From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital's influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height--the greater public panicked in quarantine--and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn't recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see again: Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more different: as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won't recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property--where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well--setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.

Publisher: Scribner UK
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 14 May 2024
Dimensions: 152 x 234 x 23 mm
ISBN: 9781398532748