I Am Radar
by Reif Larsen ’98
Penguin Press, February 2015
In 1975, a black child named Radar Radmanovic is mysteriously born to white parents. Though Radar is raised in suburban New Jersey, his story rapidly becomes entangled with terrible events in Yugoslavia, Norway, Cambodia, the Congo, and beyond. Falling in with a secretive group of puppeteers and scientists — who stage experimental art for people suffering under wartime sieges — Radar is forced to confront the true nature of his identity. Acclaimed novelist Reif Larsen delivers a triumph of storytelling at its most primal, elegant and epic. A sophisticated, highly addictive reading experience that draws on the furthest reaches of quantum physics, forgotten history, and performance art, the novel is somehow greater than all of its parts — a breathtaking and unparalleled joy ride through the worst that humanity has to offer, only to arrive at a place of shocking wonder and redemption.
Reif Larsen’s first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 27 languages. A Montana Honor book, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet was a finalist for the IndieBound Award; was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and is being released as a film both in the United States and abroad.