Summit Books UK – serie

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2026A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK A VOGUE BEST DEBUT 2026‘Stunning’ Sunday Times‘Profoundly moving’ Elif Shafak (on Instagram)'A wonderfully heartfelt debut’ Marie-Claire‘Writing is pristine. Brava, Tara Menon, this is a beauty!’ Elin Hilderbrand (on Instagram)A stunning and deeply moving novel of grief, loss and female friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic natural eventsWhen six-year-old Marissa loses her mother, she is taken by her father to live on a small Thai island in the Andaman Sea. There, she forms a deep friendship with Arielle and together they explore the fragile wonders of its forests, reefs, and beaches. Holding their breath for minutes at a time, they learn to dive into the deep, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Then, on Boxing Day 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami makes landfall, they are swept up by the first wave and separated.Eight years later, Marissa is living in New York. She spends her days wandering through the city and her nights seeking solace in the beds of strangers. As the city prepares for a devastating storm, Marissa reflects on her past and learns how to sustain herself in a precarious world.Under Water is a story about friendship and grief, but also ecological change and natural disasters. It is a meditation on loss, a tribute to our dying oceans and forests, and a love letter to the disappearing coral reefs.‘The horrors of 2004 are told with verve in this debut about a woman haunted by survivor guilt . . . there are stunning descriptions of island wildlife . . . Tara Menon tells the story with confidence and style’ Sunday Times

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.Shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award Shortlisted for the International Hellenic Prize'A deeply researched and engaging biography… Jeffreys and Jusdanis brilliantly recreate Cavafy’s world’ - Guardian‘A nuanced and original portrait’ - Literary Review‘A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work’ - Spectator'Melancholy and majesty. . . [an] extraordinary life story' - New StatesmanIn this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art and changed the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a radical new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

‘A beautifully expansive novel about race and class... Franklin's emotional and intellectual range is vast... An exceptional debut’ – Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies‘So smart, so moving, so earned; as soon as I finished, I started reading it again’ – Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!‘The precision and ecstasy of Rob Franklin's prose had me entranced. Great Black Hope marks the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer’ – Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning‘Great Black Hope will allow you to vicariously experience a sweltering summer in the city – though this debut is much more than a simple tale of hedonism’ - BBC Culture‘Perfectly captures the heady atmosphere of a New York summer’ - Dazed‘A new voice in fiction to be reckoned with’ Harper’s Bazaar ‘Best Books of 2025’‘A book about New York that’s part love letter, part reckoning’ – Guardian‘Gripping’ – Daily MailAn arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering summer leaves Smith, a young Black queer graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him but his race does not. It is just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he is still reeling from the tabloid spectacle - as well as the lingering question of how well he really knew his closest friend and what happened to her the night she died.When he flees to his hometown of Atlanta and generations of his family of doctors and college presidents and lawyers - the weight of expectations haunts him. Then Carolyn, the closest friend he has left, goes off the rails, Smith returns to New York only to lose himself in his old life, drawn back into the city's underworld. Will his search for the truth about Elle cost him his freedom and his future?Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta's Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiralling downward and how to find a way back to hope.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2026A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK A VOGUE BEST DEBUT 2026‘Stunning’ Sunday Times‘Profoundly moving’ Elif Shafak (on Instagram)'A wonderfully heartfelt debut’ Marie-ClaireA stunning and deeply moving novel of grief, loss and female friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic natural eventsWhen six-year-old Marissa loses her mother, she is taken by her father to live on a small Thai island in the Andaman Sea. There, she forms a deep friendship with Arielle and together they explore the fragile wonders of its forests, reefs, and beaches. Holding their breath for minutes at a time, they learn to dive into the deep, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Then, on Boxing Day 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami makes landfall, they are swept up by the first wave and separated.Eight years later, Marissa is living in New York. She spends her days wandering through the city and her nights seeking solace in the beds of strangers. As the city prepares for a devastating storm, Marissa reflects on her past and learns how to sustain herself in a precarious world.Under Water is a story about friendship and grief, but also ecological change and natural disasters. It is a meditation on loss, a tribute to our dying oceans and forests, and a love letter to the disappearing coral reefs.‘The horrors of 2004 are told with verve in this debut about a woman haunted by survivor guilt . . . there are stunning descriptions of island wildlife . . . Tara Menon tells the story with confidence and style’ Sunday Times

An exuberant, darkly humorous novel by the US National Book Award-shortlisted author of FieldworkCelebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on the morning of Thanksgiving to the clamour of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she has been fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals to play Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the most challenging role of her career. On an impulse, and pretending she needs to do some last-minute shopping, Mona leaves her family and heads out into the city to visit her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, the legendary director who has been forced out of the theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved. At once funny and sad and wise, Mona Acts Out is a deeply moving novel about acting and telling the truth, about how we all play roles to negotiate our lives, and how the great roles teach us how to live.Praise for MISCHA BERLINSKIMona Acts Out‘An instant-classic New York novel about theater, aging, sex and love’ Joshua Cohen, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Netanyahus‘Berlinski deserves a standing ovation for this bravura performance.’ Publishers Weekly‘Wonderfully constructed, witty, warm, wise, and filled with an extraordinary sense of the relation between theater and life’ Kirkus Reviews'Witty but insightful . . . an engaging bittersweet novel' - Herald Scotland'Richly funny' - Daily Mail Peacekeeping‘Powerfully intelligent . . . There's magic in the way that Mr. Berlinski, in command of fact and emotion, pilots this big novel safely home.’ – Dwight Garner, New York Times ‘Formidable’ James Wood, New Yorker                                                  ‘Marvelous’ Washington Post  Fieldwork‘Gripping and entertaining...you know you're in the hands of a writer to whom the novel form is, when all's said, as natural as an old overcoat... A quirky, often brilliant debut, bounced along by limitless energy’ – Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books'A killer novel... A great story... You can't stop reading.' Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly‘This is storytelling of the highest quality: richly entertaining, intelligent and anchored in a deep sense of humanity’ – Tash Aw, Guardian

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICKThe New York Times ‘Best Books of the Year (So Far)'A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in a deeply moving novel of love, faith and survival, for readers of Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist and Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See‘This made me cry on an airplane but it was worth it! A luscious, rich and moving novel, a beautiful, careful and profound book about survival and hope’ Alice Winn, bestselling author of In Memoriam‘An extraordinary book that reads like a thriller, written with the care of the most delicate psychological and historical fiction’ Vogue ‘Best Books of 2025’ ‘A shocking story, made all the more stunning by the fact that it has its roots in true history’ Jodi Picoult, author of My Sister's KeeperIn sixteenth-century France, as the heiress to an aristocratic fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of privilege. Then she is orphaned, and her enigmatic and volatile guardian squanders her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to the new French colonies of North America. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished, abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.From a childhood dressed in gowns with laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she had never before needed…Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola tells the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.Shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman AwardShortlisted for the International Hellenic Prize'A deeply researched and engaging biography… Jeffreys and Jusdanis brilliantly recreate Cavafy’s world’ - Guardian‘A nuanced and original portrait’ - Literary Review‘A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work’ - Spectator'Melancholy and majesty. . . [an] extraordinary life story' - New StatesmanIn this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art and changed the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a radical new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

‘An intimate story of self-discovery… Beautiful’ Orhan Pamuk‘For readers who loved Call Me By Your Name, this is a similarly soft, hazy, and quietly devastating story.’ Dua Lipa's Service95A moving and dreamy debut novel about the summer love that changes two girls at the edge of adulthood‘Such a tender story of love, discovery, connection, and loss. Ekin Oklap’s writing is startling in its apparent simplicity, beautifully timeless and fragile.’ Han Smith, Goldsmith Prize-shortlisted author of Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and WreckingIn the heat and the green haze that seemed to surround us both like a physical presence, I felt intensely awake.One afternoon at the start of summer, a teenager watches a new girl move in across the street. In Clara, the narrator recognises the same loneliness that she feels herself, but finds tenderness and laughter too. Over hot, languid days spent talking and reading side by side in the garden, the narrator is awakened to the possibility of a true connection with another human being, free of the self-consciousness she feels with others.Meanwhile, in a distant fictional galaxy, Nadia the space explorer - the protagonist of a children's book series beloved by both girls - traverses the known universe with her companion, Rosa. Their imagined adventures make sense of new and powerful feelings.First Summer captures the innocence and agony of adolescence and the exquisite promise of love on the cusp of adulthood: a moment where fantasy is still vivid in the mind. This story of the first summer of love echoes throughout the characters’ lives and will change them forever.‘An engrossing, passionate, and nostalgic queer coming-of-age story. Set in the heat of a teenaged summer, and in a galaxy far, far away; this book captures how it feels to connect with someone during that adolescent period when childhood fantasies collide with the realities of adulthood. A true celestial treat.’ Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

‘An intimate story of self-discovery… Beautiful’ Orhan Pamuk‘For readers who loved Call Me By Your Name, this is a similarly soft, hazy, and quietly devastating story.’ Dua Lipa's Service95A moving and dreamy debut novel about the summer love that changes two girls at the edge of adulthood‘Such a tender story of love, discovery, connection, and loss. Ekin Oklap’s writing is startling in its apparent simplicity, beautifully timeless and fragile.’ Han Smith, Goldsmith Prize-shortlisted author of Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking‘An engrossing, passionate, and nostalgic queer coming-of-age story. Set in the heat of a teenaged summer, and in a galaxy far, far away; this book captures how it feels to connect with someone during that adolescent period when childhood fantasies collide with the realities of adulthood. A true celestial treat.’ Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be DeadIn the heat and the green haze that seemed to surround us both like a physical presence, I felt intensely awake.One afternoon at the start of summer, a teenager watches a new girl move in across the street. In Clara, the narrator recognises the same loneliness that she feels herself, but finds tenderness and laughter too. Over hot, languid days spent talking and reading side by side in the garden, the narrator is awakened to the possibility of a true connection with another human being, free of the self-consciousness she feels with others.Meanwhile, in a distant fictional galaxy, Nadia the space explorer - the protagonist of a children's book series beloved by both girls - traverses the known universe with her companion, Rosa. Their imagined adventures make sense of new and powerful feelings.First Summer captures the innocence and agony of adolescence and the exquisite promise of love on the cusp of adulthood: a moment where fantasy is still vivid in the mind. This story of the first summer of love echoes throughout the characters’ lives and will change them forever.

A spellbinding tour de force from the author of The Invisible Bridge - a novel about varieties of infidelity, the provenance of a literary masterpiece, and the power of storytelling to shape identity and destiny'A miracle of a book' Katie Kitamura, author of Audition‘Luna, Phoenix, Queen breaks all the rules and makes its own. Gripping, heartbreaking, redemptive and a joy to read, Orringer has given readers a great gift. It will knock your socks off.’ Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less‘Heart-stoppingly good’ Kirkus Reviews starred reviewDava Pennington is unhappy in her marriage, and secretly in love with a female colleague; spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel inspired by the affair. But the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Alone in their house one night, her husband Barr discovers Dava’s hidden manuscript, which he reads with envy, and then with anger, as he gradually realizes that the novel is autobiographical. Feeling unable to confront her because of her illness, instead he rewrites her novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him in time to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth…Luna, Phoenix, Queen brilliantly illuminates the power of storytelling and explores the terror of losing the ability to make sense of our world. It is a cry of rage against vulnerability and helplessness; an acknowledgment of the mysteries beneath the familiar surface of our world; and ultimately, if unexpectedly, a radical testament to love in its many forms.‘No one writes a love story like Julie Orringer. In this intensely personal novel, illness cracks a family open to reveal, at its secret heart, a passionate affair, an edge-of-your-seat mystery, and one of the most memorable dogs in all of literature.’ Nell Freudenberger, Author of The Newlyweds

Donna Tart meets E.L. James in a darkly seductive debut: When a mysterious young woman comes between two married professors, their carefully crafted cat-and-mouse game crumbles, as prey becomes predator.It’s the summer of 1986 on the Kelsey College campus. Sam and Vera Ward got married decades ago and haven't slept together since. With little desire to satiate Sam's sexual appetite, Vera agrees to a certain tradition at the start of every school year. Sam is allowed to sleep with one woman of his choosing, with two ground rules: she must be a student at the college, and the affair cannot last beyond a year. This year, their target is a mysterious young woman named Jade who, unbeknownst to The Wards, is a hand grenade poised to destroy everything they've carefully built.Alluring and sharp as a tack, Jade breaks all their rules. With a plan of her own, she holds Sam in the palm of her hand, and Vera gripped in a dance of obsession and desire. What unfolds is not a romance but a reckoning, where every touch conceals a move, and every secret becomes a weapon, spiraling into an explosive ending that will leave Vera, Jade, and Sam completely undone.Jaded is an electric, provocative novel about power, the abuse of and submission to it, in which each character is forced to confront the messy web of complicity, lies, and lust in which they have, each, unwittingly entangled themselves.

An award-winning novel from an international rising star – spanning ancient and modern China – in the dazzlingly inventive style of Haruki Murakami and Kaliane Bradley'Lu has a brilliant mind for style, language, pace and ideas, and this is a funny and fascinating book that I can’t wait to read again and again.’ Guardian ‘I was mesmerised the moment I opened this book.’ Bora Chung, International Booker shortlisted author of Cursed BunnyInspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”.How is his relocation to a ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed—then recreated, page by page and book by book—all in the name of love and art?‘Siang Lu layers myth and reality into a marvelous structure. This is bold, inventive storytelling, a novel full of ideas that never loses its heart.’ Charles Yu, US National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown

From the author of The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Fortune Smiles, winner of the US National Book Award, an epic masterpiece named one of ‘Ten Best Books of 2025’ by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post‘Awesome… This astonishing novel, at once so primeval and so sophisticated, pulses with the same hopes and terrors that first pricked our imaginations around a fire as the sun set - a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant.’ Washington Post‘An epic of extraordinary abundance… modern and mythological… wondrous enough to endure’ Wall Street JournalWhen a mysterious visitor lands on her island, a place so remote its inhabitants have forgotten the word for stranger, young Kōrero finds herself thrust into a terrifying and magical world. Her people are desperate and on the brink of starvation, and the wayward stranger offers them an impossible choice: they can remain in the only home they’ve ever known and await the uncertainty to come, or Kōrero can join him and venture into unfamiliar waters, guided by only the night sky and his assurance of a bountiful future in the Kingdom of Tonga. What Kōrero and her people don’t know is that the promised refuge is no utopia - Tonga is an empire at war and on the verge of collapse, a place where brains are regularly liberated from skulls and souls may become trapped in coconuts.The perils of Tonga are compounded by a royal feud: loyalties are shifting, graves are being opened, and everyone lives in fear of a jellyfish tattoo. Here, survival can rest on a perfectly performed dance or the acceptance of a cup of kava. Together, the stranger and Kōrero embark upon an epic voyage - one that will deliver them either to salvation or to the depths of the Pacific.Evoking the grandeur of Wolf Hall and the splendor of Shōgun, Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Adam Johnson conjures oral history, restores the natural world, and locates what’s best in humanity. Toweringly ambitious and breathtakingly immersive, The Wayfinder is an instant, timeless classic.

‘There’s a bridge of beautiful American prose—lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid—running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin’s worthy heir . . . An utterly immersive book’ Francisco Goldman, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey BoyFrom the author of Man Gone Down—a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and winner of the Dublin Literary Award—comes a deeply personal memoir of race, trauma, alcoholism, parenting, mental illness and ultimately hope in a portrait of three generations of Black American menIn 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down, a beautiful and devastating story of a Black father trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. Called “powerful and moving . . . an impressive success,” by Kaiama L. Glover on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Thomas’ debut introduced a writer of prodigious and rare talent. In his long-awaited encore and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir.The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s line in “Little Gidding”: “If you came at night like a broken king,” and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Thomas’ memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying parts focusing on the lives of five men: his father—a philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and always, heartbreakingly himself. At the center of The Broken King is the story of Thomas’ own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with “the house of Beckett.”Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of America’s sweeping struggle with race and class, education and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative mind’s journey into and out of madness.

Part-memoir, part-roadmap for liberation movements across the world by Palestinian human rights activist Fadi Quran outlining a five-pillar guide of how to organize a movement to effectively resist oppression

A moving and haunting  portrait of a Palestinian immigrant’s heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy‘This is one of those rare stories that feels at once universal and impossibly strange, rooted in the ordinary challenges of the American Dream but lashed to horrors unfolding on the other side of the planet.’ Washington PostIn Naeem Murr’s first novel in two decades, the conflicts, griefs, and hopes of a community of diverse immigrants in a Chicago condominium come to represent those of the wounded world we all must share.As the financial crisis of the late Noughties looms, all that anyone truly knows about Jamal ‘Jack’ Shaban is how readily he sacrifices himself in his attempts to broker peace between his embittered neighbors. For his flight attendant colleagues, he is an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Believing that Jack is gay, Birdy knows nothing of Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor isDimra aware of Jack’s attraction to Marcia: an angry single mother new to the building. The resulting tangle of conflict, love and desire returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a love affair led him to exile and nearly destroyed his life.A man of many faces - adulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and present - Jack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is darkness. Weaving poignant tragedy and bittersweet comedy, a tale of one man’s blasted hopes and indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, this is a book to love, reread and remember.‘Timely and urgent, EveryExit Brings You Home explores Jack’s hopes, sorrows, and regrets—and, by proxy, those of immigrants everywhere.’ Harper’s Bazaar

Violinist Vijay Gupta’s searing memoir of prodigy, ambition, collapse, and renewal reveals how music is not just performance but also survival, a lifeline of human connection - for readers of Jeremy Denk's Every Good Boy Does Fine, Hua Hsu's Stay True, and Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World.'Every page burns with moral conviction’ Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise​ By age 25, Vijay Gupta had lived several lifetimes: he played Carnegie Hall at eight, studied at Juilliard and Yale before most had finished high school, joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at nineteen, gave a celebrated TED Talk seen by millions, and launched a nonprofit. But behind the accolades was estrangement, addiction, and a private unraveling.Restrung is Gupta’s unflinching memoir of breaking apart and remaking a self. It begins with a boy raised between the strict devotion of Bengali immigrant parents and the ruthless demands of the conservatory. It follows him through the shimmering world of elite orchestras, into the depths of burnout, and ultimately toward an unexpected reawakening - where he discovered that the music he’d spent his life studying was seen not as a curio of high culture or mere entertainment, but a lifeline of connection - most vividly in Skid Row, where people living through addiction, homelessness, and incarceration heard it as survival itself.There, audiences spoke to how they saw their own lives reflected in the stories of composers too often frozen into marble busts: the rage of Beethoven, the fragility of Schumann’s mind, the alienation of Bartók, the plight of Handel - who wrote Messiah bankrupt, ill, and broken, yet transformed despair into an enduring Hallelujah. Restrung unsettles assumptions about success while illuminating how art restores not just audiences, but artists themselves.