A Time Outside This Time cover art

A Time Outside This Time

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

A Time Outside This Time

By: Amitava Kumar
Narrated by: Amitava Kumar
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £9.99

Buy Now for £9.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

From the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana comes a one-of-a-kind novel about memory, politics, a world of lies, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.

'A shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.' The New Yorker

When Satya attends a prestigious artists’ retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the US president rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the twenty-four-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. These Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.

As he sifts through newspaper clippings, the President’s tweets, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, Amitava Kumar’s A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with a precisely observant intelligence and an eye for the uncanny.

A brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era, this piercing novel captures the sentiment on all our minds, of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.

City Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Political Urban

Listeners also enjoyed...

All the Lies They Did Not Tell cover art
A History of Fear cover art
Go, Went, Gone cover art
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance cover art
The Lion's Den cover art
Denial cover art
Zoo Station cover art
We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders cover art
The Twilight Zone cover art
The Chief Witness cover art
Afropessimism cover art
Disoriental cover art

Critic reviews

In this age of lies, can we rely on fiction to cover the facts? Amitava Kumar’s entertaining and incisive A Time Outside This Time provides a convincing answer . . . necessary and beautiful. (Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild)
A brilliant, expansive account of one man’s attempt to follow his moral compass through a maze of disinformation and discord. Kumar has an uncanny ability to find and illuminate the radiance that remains in our half-ruined world. (Jenny Offill, author of Weather and Dept of Speculation)
Beautiful, deft and full of memorable details . . . A Time Outside This Time is a courageous book, incredibly relevant for the present moment and crucial for imagining a better future. (Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project)
Like a modern Orwell or Thoreau, Amitava Kumar explores the dangers of disinformation and the ways politics shape our everyday lives. Sensuous and searching, this is an absorbing portrait of an inspired artist in the midst of our maddening cultural moment. (Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies)
Amitava Kumar has the precious ability to write across borders and cultures. This brilliant, learned, and anguished novel succeeds in inventing a new vantage point on our agitated and bewildering world. (Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland )
Novels this good come along once in a lifetime. Kumar has fashioned a brilliant prophetic meditation on the age of untruth. (Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
As Satya uncovers the "truth of fiction," Kumar provides a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.
Kumar navigates the mists of contemporary deception with a penetrating intelligence and keen sense of paradox (TLS)
No reviews yet