The Buddha of Suburbia author’s wildly inspiring memoir of illness and defiance

‘All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.”

On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome with his Italian partner Isabella, Hanif Kureishi felt dizzy while sitting at the table. He fainted, landing on his neck and becoming tetraplegic as a result. He spent 2023 in Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. “I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.” Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.