Run and Hide
PANKAJ MISHRA
(HEINEMANN, 336 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

In the two decades since Pankaj Mishra published his debut novel, The Romantics, he’s become well known for his political non-fiction, and Run and Hide is in some ways a vehicle for his preoccupations with the post-colonial world order explored in Age of Anger (2017) and Bland Fanatics (2021). This gives the novel a slightly didactic, remote quality, in spite of some vivid passages about the changes in modern Indian society.

A harsher story than The Romantics, though it has a similar misfit, bookish hero, it starts disturbingly, with brutal initiation rites at the Indian Institute of Technology, the country’s most prestigious engineering college. Here Arun, who has a fake Brahmin surname (he dreads being found out), meets fellow students Aseem and Virendra, both from lower castes.