From Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbia, a memoir about the accident that left him paralysed.
‘A few days ago, a bomb went off in my life, but this bomb has also shattered the lives of those around me. My partner, my children, my friends.’
On Boxing Day 2022, in Rome, Hanif Kureishi had a fall. When he came to, in a pool of blood, he was horrified to realise he had lost the use of his limbs. He could no longer walk, write or wash himself. He could do nothing without the help of others, and required constant care in a hospital. So began an odyssey of a year through the medical systems of Rome and Italy, with the hope of somehow being able to return home, to his house in London.
While confined to a series of hospital wards, he felt compelled to write, but being unable to type or to hold a pen, he began to dictate to family members the words which formed in his head. The result was an extraordinary series of dispatches from his hospital bed – a diary of a life in pieces, recorded with rare honesty, clarity and courage.
This book takes these hospital dispatches – edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing – and charts both a shattering and a reassembling: a new life born of pain and loss, but animated by new feelings – of gratitude, humility and love.
MEDIA REVIEWS
Extraordinary, unique and unputdownable . . . an exceptional volume as original as Jean-Dominique Bauby’s stroke classic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [and] as profound and affected as Salman Rushdie’s Knife . . . This fall provoked a rare, and inspiring, defiance . . . Shattered, with its unique authorship, has become a life-saver. For the reader, this compounds the intensity of its witness - Robert McCrum, Independent
A thoroughly compelling, and deeply harrowing, account of Kureishi’s life . . . few could write about it with the piercing candour and clarity that Kureishi has done. There is frustration, anger, sometimes despair, but not a trace of self-pity - Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph
Raw and earnest . . . Kureishi’s fans will find Shattered wildly inspiring; his singular voice, his bawdy humour, his efforts to create meaning, all so characteristic and moving . . . I can’t wait to read everything he has to write - Dina Nayeri, Guardian
An enthralling report on how a person can be forced to reckon with sudden, shocking change . . . Shattered is its own lifeline, and a neat exemplar of what we mean when we describe a book as ‘necessary’: its value for readers is at one with its urgency of expression to the human being drowning in the experience it attempts to redeem . . . It’s impossible not to read Shattered in a spirit of generosity and communion - Observer, 'Book of the Day'
Kureishi, a taboo-buster since his days as a punk-era playwright, has always hunted for the freedom, even joy, hiding on the other side of shame. He still does . . . Shattered trumpets the strength of his droll and trenchant voice above the ‘random evil stuff’ that ‘can happen to you at any time’ . . . His dispatches from the planet of paralysis draw on the good habits of a writing lifetime — clarity, comedy, courage, unshockable attentiveness — to depict a self, and a family, “smashed, remade and altered” . . . Only Kureishi could have rebuilt these pieces of a fractured life so well - Financial Times
[Shattered is] an authentic depiction of Kureishi’s whirring mind, particularly in the constant alternation of hope and despair . . . At one point, he sternly declares that writing is “not therapy for the writer but entertainment for the reader”. Yet, while the entertainment here is of a complicated kind, Shattered shows, triumphantly, that it’s possible to combine the two - James Walton, Daily Telegraph
