In Rome on St Stephen’s Day 2022, the writer Hanif Kureishi took a fall that left him almost completely paralysed. Throughout the subsequent year he spent in hospitals – first in Italy, then in his home city of London – confronting the horror of his new reality as a severely disabled person, Kureishi dictated “dispatches” to his wife, Isabella, and his sons, which were published online. Helped by his family, the author has expanded these dispatches into a memoir of catastrophe whose driving question is nothing less than that of how its author is meant to go on: “Paki, writer, cripple: who am I now?”
I imagine that Shattered was at once the hardest and the easiest book Kureishi has ever written: hard because of the irreversibly awful circumstance that occasioned it; easy because, with material this intrinsically interesting – a reversal of fortunes so dramatic and grotesque – any halfway talented writer could fashion something readable. Sure enough, Shattered is an enthralling report on how a person can be forced to reckon with sudden, shocking change.
