Shattered: A Memoir

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. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)