Kureishi, Hanif

Something to Tell You: A Novel

In the early 1980s Hanif Kureishi emerged as one of the most compelling new voices in film and fiction. His movies My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia captivated audiences and inspired other artists. In Something to Tell You, he travels back to those days of hedonism, activism and glorious creativity. And he explores the lives of that generation now, in a very different London.

Jamal is middle-aged, though reluctant to admit it. He has an ex-wife, a son he adores, a thriving career as a psychoanalyst and vast reserves of unsatisfied desire. "Secrets are my currency," he says. "I deal in them for a living." And he has some of his own. He is haunted by Ajita, his first love, whom he hasn't seen in decades, and by an act of violence he has never confessed.

With great empathy and agility, Kureishi has created an array of unforgettable characters -- a hilarious and eccentric theater director, a covey of charming and defiant outcasts and an ebullient sister who thrives on the fringe. All wrestle with their own limits as human beings; all are plagued by the past until they find it within themselves to forgive.

Comic, wise and unfailingly tender, Something to Tell You is Kureishi's best work to date, brilliant and exhilarating.

The Buddha of Suburbia

There's quite a bit of activity in Buddha of Suburbia. A bureaucrat becomes a suburban guru who marries a follower with a son who's a punk rocker named Charlie Hero. Consequently, the guru's son is propelled from his bland life into a series of erotic experiences in London. All the while, Hanif Kureishi keeps the tone lively with wry wit. On the description of suburban life: "We were proud of never learning anything except the names of footballers, the personnel of rock groups and the lyrics to 'I Am the Walrus.'" He also bends cultures, classes and genders while blasting the racism of British life in this 1990 Whitbread Prize winner.

A love story for at least two generstions, a high-spirited comedy of sexual manners and social turmoil, The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the most enchanting, provocative, and original books to appear in years. "A wickedly funny novel that's at once a traditional comedy of manners and a scathing satire on race relations in Britain."--The New York Times.

Intimacy

Hanif Kureishi's fourth novel made many reviewers uneasy on its first appearance in the U.K., because it cuts so painfully near to the bone. If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then the author has done his duty with unflinching courage. Intimacy gives us the thoughts and memories of a middle-aged writer on the night before he walks out on his wife and two young sons for of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfillment in sexual love. No one is spared Kureishi's cold, penetrating gaze or lacerating pen. "She thinks she's feminist, but she's just bad-tempered," the unnamed narrator says of his abandoned wife. A male friend advises him, "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell, and a reason for living."

At the heart of Intimacy is this terrible paradox: "You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them." Male readers will wince with recognition at the narrator's hatred of entrapment and domesticity, and his implacable urge towards freedom, escape, even loneliness. Female readers may find it a truly horrific revelation. Kureishi is only telling it like it is, in staccato sentences of pinpoint accuracy. By far the author's best yet: a brilliant, devastating work. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

"Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately."

Jay, the narrator of Hanif Kureishi's third novel, tells his story on the night that he is preparing to leave his lover, Susan, and their two boys. His departure will not be impulsive: "I have contemplated this rupture from all sides," he says. But it will happen. He and Susan live comfortably in London. Each loves the children. Yet Jay, "lost in the middle of [his] life," craves and depends on passion in life, and it is no longer there.

Known for "very funny works about serious topics" (San Francisco Review of Books) and his uncanny ability to capture the mores of our time, Kureishi strips away all posturing and self-justification to expose the flaws of his own protagonist and the failure of intimacy. Searingly honest, he explores the fears and desires that drive a man to leave a woman. Rarely has such challenging and complex emotion fit into so compact a novel; rarely has an experience both common and uniquely devastating been so courageously portrayed.

War With No End

John Berger, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Joe Sacco and others examine the consequences of the "War on Terror."

On October 7th 2001, US-led forces invaded Afghanistan, marking the start of George Bush and Tony Blair's "War on Terror". Six years on, where have the policies of Bush and Blair left us? Bringing together some of the finest contemporary writers, this wide-ranging anthology, from reportage and "faction" to fiction, explores the impact of this "long war" throughout the world, from Palestine to Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the curtailment of civil liberties and manipulation of public opinion. Published in conjunction with Stop the War coalition and United for Peace and Justice, it provides an urgent, necessary reflection on the causes and consequences of the ideological War on Terror.

The Black Album

Shahid, a young man at a second-rate London college, finds himself torn between his own future and the growing fervor of the Muslim community. By the author of The Buddha of Suburbia. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

The Body: A Novel

"After a bit you realize there's only one invaluable commodity. Not gold or love, but time."

How far are we willing to go to stay young? Hanif Kureishi -- acclaimed author of The Buddha of Suburbia and Intimacy -- explores the possibilities in this provocative story of an older man whose brain is surgically placed in a younger man's body by a network of underground doctors.

Adam is offered the chance to trade in his sagging flesh for a much younger and more pleasing model. He tells his wife and son that he is going on an extended vacation. He immediately embarks on an odyssey of hedonism, but soon finds himself regretting what he left behind and feeling guilt over the responsibilities he has ignored. Sinister forces pursue him, wanting possession of "his" body, and he soon finds himself with nowhere to turn.

"A fluent, socially observant writer whose sentences move with intelligence and wit" (The New York Times Book Review), Kureishi presents us with both a fantastically vivid tale and hard-hitting questions about our own relationships with our minds and bodies -- and with time that is running out.

Love in a Blue Time: Short Stories

This provocative collection of short stories charts the growth of a generation from the liberating irreverence of the late 1970s to the dilemmas of responsibility and fidelity of the 1990s. The stories resonate with Hanif Kureishi's dead-on observations of human passion and folly, his brilliant depiction of seedy locales and magical characters, and his original, wicked sense of humor.

Gabriel's Gift: A Novel

Gabriel's father, a washed-up rock musician, has been chucked out of the house by Gabriel's mother, who works nights and sleeps days. Lonely Gabriel finds solace in a mysterious connection to his deceased twin, Archie, and in his gift for producing real objects simply by drawing them. Then a chance visit with rock star Lester Jones, his father's former band mate, provides Gabriel with a tool that might help mend his family. All he has to do is figure out how to use it.

Hanif Kureishi portrays Gabriel's naive hope and artistic aspirations with the same insight that he brought to the Anglo-Indian experience in The Buddha of Suburbia and to infidelity in Intimacy. Gabriel's Gift is a tender meditation on failure, talent, and the power of imagination, and offers a humorous portrait of a generation that only started to think about growing up when its children did.

Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories

Together in one volume -- Hanif Kureishi's highly acclaimed and controversial novel, Intimacy, and, available for the first time, his latest collection of provocative short stories, Midnight All Day.

Jay, the narrator of Intimacy, tells his story on the night he is preparing to leave his lover, Susan, and their two boys. Stripping away all posturing and self-justification, Hanif Kureishi explores the fears and desires that drive a man to leave a woman. Midnight All Day is an astonishing, darkly comic collection of new stories, in which Kureishi confirms his reputation as one of our foremost chroniclers of the loveless, the lost and the dispossessed. The characters are familiar in the cultural landscape of the nineties: frustrated and intoxicated, melancholic and sensitive, yet capable of great cruelty, and if necessary, willing to break the constraints of an old life to make way for the new.

Midnight All Day