Hari Kunzru is in a cafe in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum. In a few hours he will read from his new novel at the nearby London Review Bookshop; for now, though, he is drinking tea and considering the subject that looms over all of us in London: the riots.
For three consecutive nights before this meeting, thousands of rioters have crowded into the streets, looted shops, burnt cars and fought with police. The hold that these events exert over the city - literal and metaphorical - is particularly stark for Kunzru, because his arrival in the UK coincided almost exactly with their beginning. Kunzru is British, but lives in New York.
We agree, quickly, on the strangeness of it all. Then our conversation turns to the cause:
"Are the riots properly political?" he muses. "It would be much easier for people on the left if the rioters had a coherent agenda, other than a desire to go shopping for free. But I think the causes are political.
"Hackney, where I have a house, is a place of parallel worlds. There is the world of the hipster and the world of the hoodie [that is, the apparently threatening young person, who, in the popular imagination, always wears a hooded top], and the two rarely meet. The riots are forcing us to pay attention to this huge gulf between two communities."
We talk for a while about this gulf. It is apposite, because the real purpose of this meeting, Kunzru's fourth novel Gods Without Men, is a book that treads around just these ideas: the gap between what we know and what we don't, the exhilarating space between understanding and ignorance.
Kunzru, 42, is now four novels into a glittering career that began with 2002's The Impressionist. That novel won him a place on the influential Granta list of Best Young British Novelists in 2003, and his work since then - including 2008's My Revolutions - has secured him a place among Britain's best-known young(ish) literary novelists.
Gods Without Men accommodates a series of loosely connected narratives, which are grounded by the shared landscape against which they take place: a rock formation called the Pinnacles in the Mojave Desert, California. There is Schmidt, a former Second World War aircraft engineer who waits for contact with extraterrestrials. Fast-forward to 2008 and we find Nicky, a British rock star stranded in California and failing to make a record. These and other narrative strands, though, move around the central story of Indian-American Jas and his Jewish-American wife, Lisa. The disappearance of their autistic son, Raj, becomes the axis around which the novel turns.
A chance trip into the Californian desert set Kunzru on the road to Gods Without Men. In 2008, when he arrived in the US on a one-year fellowship at the New York Public Library, he had different plans: a novel set in 16th-century India.
"I decided to go out there and live in a monkish way, and do this fellowship," he says. "The set up is absolutely brilliant, they give you enough money to live on in New York, an office in this beautiful building, everything. I was there with my blank sheet of paper. And I just couldn't write. Eventually, some friends said they were planning a trip to Joshua Tree [National Park in California]. I was doing nothing, so I went along. We drove around the desert for about a week. And we just encountered all these amazing stories."
Many of the strands in the novel are based on the real stories that Kunzru encountered: the Ashtar Galactic Command, for example, a cult that believed it could contact alien life; or the existence in the desert of military simulations of the Iraq war, used to train US soldiers before they departed for Iraq and real combat.
It's a novel, then, founded in research. But Gods Without Men wears that learning lightly. What is the trick when it comes to weaving this kind of research into a novel?
"You have to knock the scaffolding away," says Kunzru. "It's about doing a lot of research so that you're immersed in the subject, and then not looking at it while you're writing. I become obsessed with photos, and end up collecting a lot of ephemera from the period that I'm thinking about. But as soon as you're writing a sentence to prove to the reader that you know that obscure fact about the mechanism of a jukebox or whatever, then you've gone wrong."
As Gods Without Men progresses, the narrative strands that it presents to us start to knock against one another, and to resonate. Some British reviewers have criticised Kunzru for failing to provide a neat, loose-ends-tied-up resolution. Enlightened readers might accuse them of missing the point: this is a novel about the absence of resolutions, about the gap between the human and the transcendental.
"It would have been easy," he says, "to write a novel that relies on old conventions about how stories are nested together - you know, you have a character who finds someone's diary, and it explains the whole thing, but that feels hokey now, we need new forms. I'm very interested in a kind of narrative rhyming, in which events are connected by a shared shape or rhythm, rather than a traditional causal connection."
We're back, then, where we started: talking about gaps in our understanding of the world, how we understand them, how we bridge them.
"The interesting people are honing in on absence, and silence, on how it feels when loose ends are not tied up. That is a function of our experience. Reality is like that. That's where the interesting work is being done right now."
The Bio
Favourite vegetable: “I really like the taste of the beetroot, the potatoes and the eggplant we are producing.”
Holiday destination: “I like Paris very much, it’s a city very close to my heart.”
Book: “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but there are a lot of lessons for the capitalist system, if you let it get out of control, and humanity.”
Musician: “I like very much Fairuz, the Lebanese singer, and the other is Umm Kulthum. Fairuz is for listening to in the morning, Umm Kulthum for the night.”
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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KYLIAN MBAPPE 2016/17 STATS
Ligue 1: Appearances - 29, Goals - 15, Assists - 8
UCL: Appearances - 9, Goals - 6
French Cup: Appearances - 3, Goals - 3
France U19: Appearances - 5, Goals - 5, Assists - 1
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Disclaimer
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville
Rating: 4/5
The specs
AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Power: 420hp
Torque: 623Nm
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now
Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
Apple's%20Lockdown%20Mode%20at%20a%20glance
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
PROFILE OF STARZPLAY
Date started: 2014
Founders: Maaz Sheikh, Danny Bates
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment/Streaming Video On Demand
Number of employees: 125
Investors/Investment amount: $125 million. Major investors include Starz/Lionsgate, State Street, SEQ and Delta Partners
Company%20Profile
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COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Akeed
Based: Muscat
Launch year: 2018
Number of employees: 40
Sector: Online food delivery
Funding: Raised $3.2m since inception
Specs
Engine: 51.5kW electric motor
Range: 400km
Power: 134bhp
Torque: 175Nm
Price: From Dh98,800
Available: Now
Related
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Lamsa
Founder: Badr Ward
Launched: 2014
Employees: 60
Based: Abu Dhabi
Sector: EdTech
Funding to date: $15 million
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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World Cup League Two
Results
Oman beat Nepal by 18 runs
Oman beat United States by six wickets
Nepal beat United States by 35 runs
Oman beat Nepal by eight wickets
Fixtures
Tuesday, Oman v United States
Wednesday, Nepal v United States
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Neil Thomson – THE BIO
Family: I am happily married to my wife Liz and we have two children together.
Favourite music: Rock music. I started at a young age due to my father’s influence. He played in an Indian rock band The Flintstones who were once asked by Apple Records to fly over to England to perform there.
Favourite book: I constantly find myself reading The Bible.
Favourite film: The Greatest Showman.
Favourite holiday destination: I love visiting Melbourne as I have family there and it’s a wonderful place. New York at Christmas is also magical.
Favourite food: I went to boarding school so I like any cuisine really.
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
The%20specs
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Europe’s rearming plan
- Suspend strict budget rules to allow member countries to step up defence spending
- Create new "instrument" providing €150 billion of loans to member countries for defence investment
- Use the existing EU budget to direct more funds towards defence-related investment
- Engage the bloc's European Investment Bank to drop limits on lending to defence firms
- Create a savings and investments union to help companies access capital
2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, Leon.
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.