Fury

Life is fury. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise — the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammelled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb.

Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinary, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees to New York. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to ‘erase’ himself. Eat me America, he prays, and give me peace.

But fury is all around him. Cab drivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A young woman in a D'Angelo baseball cap is in store. Also, another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn towards a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world.

Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of New York. Not since the Bombay of Midnight's Children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel.