Tremor by Teju Cole – a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature

Teju Cole’s new novel Tremor is out now from Jonathan Ball Publishers!

The new novel from the author of the celebrated Open City – a powerful and masterful exploration of what makes a meaningful life in a world of violence and wonder.

Teju Cole is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief, Open City and Known and Strange Things. His honours include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the New York City Book Award and the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. His photography has been widely exhibited, and he is the Photography Critic of The New York Times Magazine.

About the book

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.

Tunde, the man at the centre of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener and a traveller drawn to many different kinds of stories: from history and the epic; of friends, family and strangers; those found in books and films. One man’s personal lens refracts entire worlds, and back again.

A weekend spent shopping for antiques 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 speak out from a pulsing metropolis.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amid ‘history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles’ – but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy.

This is narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

The new novel from Teju Cole, author of Open City – is a powerful and masterful exploration of what makes a meaningful life in a world of violence and wonder.

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— Jonathan Ball Publishers (@JonathanBallPub) November 6, 2023