Hutchinson Heinemann snaps up Mishra's first novel in 20 years

Hutchinson Heinemann has secured the first novel in 20 years by award-winning author Pankaj Mishra.   

Ailah Ahmed, publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding North America and India, from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Run and Hide will be published simultaneously by Juggernaut in India and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US. It will be released in hardback, audiobook and e-book on 24th February 2022. 

“Beautifully written and sharply intelligent, Run and Hide is a novel about a group of friends in our age of global upheaval and breakdown; it is a story for our times,” Hutchinson Heinemann said. “Arun knows there is only way out of his small railway town. He arrives at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, determined to make something of himself. But once there, he meets two friends who are prepared to go to unimaginable lengths to succeed.” 

“In just a few years, Arun's friends become the success stories of their generation. In private planes and expensive cars, from New York to Tuscany, they play out their Gatsby-style fantasies over the most hectic years of globalisation. In reality, these men are about to pay for their transgressions, but who exactly will pay the price?”  

Mishra's books include The Romantics (Picador), which won the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for fiction, and most recently Bland Fanatics which will be out from Verso Books in paperback this October, among others. His next non-fiction book, The East Was Red, will be published by Verso Books in 2022.  

He contributes political and literary essays to the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.