A Time Outside This Time

Praise

“Kumar’s prose is magnetic. Using a sparse but intimate telling, Kumar’s writing enraptures the reader with each turn of Satya’s investigations.”
—Sara Webster, Chicago Review of Books

“As Satya uncovers the ‘truth of fiction,’ Kumar provides a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.”
—The New Yorker

“Kumar’s marvelous book channels Orwell in its outline of our dilemmas with disinformation. Sensuous and searching, this is an absorbing portrait of an inspired artist in the midst of our maddening cultural moment.”
—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

“In this age of lies, can we rely on fiction to cover the facts? Amitava Kumar’s entertaining and incisive A Time Outside This Time provides a convincing answer. This novel is both necessary and beautiful.”
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Brave Enough

“A brilliant, expansive account of one man’s attempt to follow his moral compass through a maze of disinformation and discord. Kumar has an uncanny ability to find and illuminate the radiance that remains in our half-ruined world.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Weather

“Amitava Kumar has the precious ability to write across borders and cultures. This brilliant, anguished novel offers an essential vantage point to our agitated and bewildering world.”
—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland

“Why write when things are falling apart? More importantly: how to write when the might of fiction is abused by the worst, when lies are eating through what seemed like reality just a moment ago? These are perennial novelist questions, and A Time Outside This Time confronts them head on. Amitava Kumar’s prose is beautiful, deft and full of memorable details; his narration is marked by immense curiosity, kindness and clarity of thought. He seems to be writing in real time, trying to comprehend, with admirable hope and patience, how to retain faith in literature, in democracy, in the kindness of others. A Time Outside This Time is a courageous book, incredibly relevant for the present moment and crucial for imagining a better future.”
—Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project

“I love this book. In all honesty I had thought revisiting it in the current cultural moment might be too depressing or just reduntant, but to the contrary — the lucidity and integrity of the thinking, the quiet power of the sentences, the insistence of the final uneclipsability of truth by bullshit — all very heartening. As literature and as a vision of the possible, a reminder that the sun will set on this cursed moment just like it did on the last one.”
—Justin Taylor, on Instagram