Hanif Kureishi Returns with Are You With Me Now? After 2022 Fall

Hanif Kureishi's new essay collection, Are You With Me Now?, arrives nearly four years after the Boxing Day 2022 fall that left him tetraplegic (quadriplegic — paralysed in all four limbs). The Guardian's review describes a writer whose post-accident musings, on everything from sex chatbots to film stars, have become gloriously unleashed.

The book follows Kureishi's 2024 memoir Shattered, which he wrote in what the reviewer calls the long shock of severance from his former life. The accident left him with no movement in his hands or legs — "a Beckettian chattering mouth," in his own phrase. Are You With Me Now? picks up the story from there.

What happens when a rebel comes home?

The review's opening scene: some months after returning home, after a grim year spent in hospitals in Rome and London, Kureishi begins to rebel. Not against his family. Not against the physical reality of his condition — and how could he, the reviewer asks. His target is the liberal homogeneity of Shepherd's Bush, his west London neighbourhood.

His acts of rebellion are small and pointed. He gets a diamond stud in his left ear at Westfield shopping centre, a piercing that enraged his father when Kureishi was 17. He sends off for a Maga cap and wears both — stud and cap — to the farmers' market, hoping for vitriol. He gets nothing.

"These quiescent scumbags only cared about themselves and their shopping," he grumbles. "Being a fascist is far less thrilling than I imagined."

What does this change for Kureishi's writing?

The reviewer frames this "re-punking" as an ongoing project for a writer who has spent decades inside the metropolitan elite. It is one response among many to paralysis. The mechanism matters here: the accident didn't mute Kureishi's contrarian instinct, it amplified it. Freed from old proprieties, the essays range widely — sex chatbots, film stars — with an edge the reviewer finds both provocative and comic.

The Maga cap episode is the tell. Kureishi isn't declaring allegiance; he's fishing for a fight with his neighbours and disappointed by their indifference. That's the old provocateur's move, now performed from a wheelchair.

For readers, the practical question is whether Are You With Me Now? repeats Shattered or moves past it. The review's verdict — "back to basics" — suggests the new book is less about the accident itself and more about what a mind like Kureishi's does when the body stops cooperating: it keeps poking at the world, harder than before.

The trajectory from Shattered's raw shock to this book's unleashed curiosity marks Kureishi's most prolific stretch since the accident, and it shows no sign of stopping.