Tremor -- Teju Cole, Hardcover

An "extraordinary, ambitious" (The Times UK) novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world--from the award-winning author of Open City

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - "Cole's mind is so agile that it's easy to follow him anywhere."--The New Yorker

A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We're invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles," but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

Author: Teju Cole
Publisher: Random House
Published: 10/17/2023
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780812997118

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2023 pg. 3
Library Journal 07/01/2023 pg. 62
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 08/21/2023
Booklist 09/01/2023 pg. 45

About the Author
Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. His books include the novel Open City, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and the experimental photobook Blind Spot. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Previously the photography critic of The New York Times Magazine, Cole is currently a Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.