Shattered
From the author of The Buddha of Suburbia
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2025
From Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbia, a memoir about the accident that left him paralysed.
‘I’ve never felt tempted to use the word “inspirational” about a book, and promise I never will again, but it’s the only word I can think of to describe Shattered’ Lynn Barber, The Spectator
Imagine your life changing in a second: one minute you are watching the football with a beer, the next you are on the floor in a pool of blood, deprived of the use of your arms and legs. This fall renders you paralysed, robbed of your independence, entirely reliant on others for everything.
This happened to writer Hanif Kureishi on Boxing Day 2022. His account of what happened and its aftermath is a unique, riveting and frequently riotous account of a year-long odyssey home through five hospitals. From despair to hope, rage to courage, it might be the most truthful, and the funniest, medical disaster story ever written.
‘Incredible. A remarkable tale of resilience – and surprisingly funny’ iNews
‘Heartbreaking. [A] masterpiece of British stoicism. Intimate, brave and uplifting’ Independent
‘Wildly inspiring. His singular voice, his bawdy humour, his efforts to create meaning, all so characteristic and moving’ Guardian
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In this raw but uneven account, Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) presents diary entries that others transcribed for him while he was recovering from a debilitating fall. The author was at his girlfriend's Rome apartment in 2022 when a dizzy spell left him in a "grotesquely twisted position" on the floor, leading the 67-year-old to believe he was dying. "It wasn't the past but the future I thought I about," he writes. "Everything I was being robbed of, all the things I wanted to do." As Kureishi recouped in the hospital from the spinal injury he sustained in his fall, the existential reckonings continued. His diary entries ricochet between his fears that he'll never return home, reflections on his career, and memories of his childhood as the son of a Pakistani immigrant with his own thwarted literary ambitions. Angry, needy, and desperate for company, Kureishi finds occasional silver linings in more time with his busy sons and new opportunities to practice vulnerability. The author's rambling thoughts are by turns insightful and irritating; breakthroughs about the value of family brush up against tiresome name-dropping and crude "finger up my arse" descriptions of life in rehab. Inconsistency mars this otherwise pointed and moving narrative about the loss of bodily autonomy.
