A Time Outside This Time

A ‘non-fiction novel’ about lies and violence, ranging across Trump and Modi, the narrator’s childhood experience of communal violence in India, and his wife’s work as a psychologist.

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From the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana comes a one-of-a-kind novel about memory, politics, a world of lies, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.

'A shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.' – The New Yorker

When Satya attends a prestigious artists’ retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the US president rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the twenty-four-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. These Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.

As he sifts through newspaper clippings, the President’s tweets, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, Amitava Kumar’s A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with a precisely observant intelligence and an eye for the uncanny.

A brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era, this piercing novel captures the sentiment on all our minds, of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.