Hanif Kureishi Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
  2. The Black Album (1995)
  3. Gabriel’s Gift (2001)
  4. The Mother (2003)
  5. When the Night Begins (2004)
  6. Something to Tell You (2008)
  7. The Last Word (2014)
  8. The Nothing (2017)

Collections

  1. Outskirts (1983)
  2. Birds of Passage (1983)
  3. Outskirts and Other Plays (1992)
  4. Love in a Blue Time (1997)
  5. Intimacy (1998)
  6. Hanif Kureishi Plays (1999)
  7. Midnight All Day (1999)
  8. Intimacy and Midnight All Day (2001)
  9. Collected Screenplays 1 (2002)
  10. The Body (2002)
  11. Ox-Tales: Earth (2009)
  12. The Black Album with My Son the Fanatic (2009)
  13. Collected Stories (2010)
  14. RED (2012)
  15. What Happened? (2019)

Plays

  1. Borderline (1981)
  2. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988)
  3. London Kills Me (1991)
  4. Sleep with Me (1999)
  5. Venus (2007)
  6. The Black Album – Adapted for the Stage (2010)

Novellas

  1. My Beautiful Laundrette (1996)
  2. My Son the Fanatic (1998)

Non fiction

  1. The Faber Book of Pop (1995)
  2. Dreaming and Scheming (2002)
  3. My Ear at His Heart (2004)
  4. The Word and the Bomb (2005)
  5. War With No End (2007)
  6. Collected Essays (2011)
  7. Theft: My Conman (2014)
  8. Love Hate (2015)

Novels Book Covers

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Hanif Kureishi Books Overview

The Buddha of Suburbia

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.

The Black Album

Long before Islamic fundamentalism became a household phrase, Hanif Kureishi began visiting mosques in London and witnessing the flocks of young Asians many of them second generation immigrants who were turning to Islam. Kureishi was perplexed by these young people, brought up in secular Britain but intent on choosing a strict religious code that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived. First published in 1995, The Black Album is Kureishi’s raucous, exuberant, and prophetic examination of this new phenomenon. His protagonist Shahid, from a Pakistani immigrant family, is perilously fond of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. A student at a dismal community college in London, he wants to please the conservative Muslims in the flat next door but is enthralled by the gorgeous Deedee Osgood, a radical, hard partying college professor with a penchant for sex in taxis. Also included in this new edition of The Black Album is ‘My Son the Fanatic,’ Kureishi’s brilliant short story, published in The New Yorker and made into an award winning film. ‘My Son the Fanatic’ reveals the shifting values between a father and son two generations of immigrants struggling between assimilation and separatist fundamentalism. Available together for the first time, The Black Album and ‘My Son the Fanatic’ are more timely and relevant than ever exhilarating and prescient writing from one of the most celebrated voices in British fiction and film.

Gabriel’s Gift

Gabriel’s father, a washed up rock musician, has been chucked out of the house. His mother works nights in a pub and sleeps days. Navigating his way through the shattered world of his parents’ generation, Gabriel dreams of being an artist. He finds solace and guidance through a mysterious connection to his deceased twin brother, Archie, and his own knack for producing real objects simply by drawing them. A chance visit with mega millionaire rock star Lester Jones, his father’s former band mate, provides Gabriel with the means to heal the rift within his family. Kureishi portrays Gabriel’s naive hope and artistic aspirations with the same insight and searing honesty that he brought to the Indian Anglo experience in ‘The Buddha of Suburbia and to infidelity in ‘Intimacy. Gabriel’s Gift is a humorous and tender meditation on failure, redemption, the nature of talent, the power of imagination and a generation that never wanted to grow up, seen through the eyes of their children.

Something to Tell You

THE STUNNINGLY ORIGINAL, ICONOCLASTIC, AWARD WINNING AUTHOR OF THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA RETURNS WITH HIS FINEST, MOST EXUBERANT 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.

Outskirts and Other Plays

In 1981 Hanif Kureishi was voted the Most Promising Playwright of the Year by the London Theatre Critics for his plays ‘Borderline’ and ‘Outskirts’. This selection of original works shows his development as a writer finding his own subject matter and establishing his characteristically powerful style, before moving into films with ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’. This examination of Kureishi’s work looks at it from the author’s own experience and from the perspective of the radical British theatre of the 1970s.

Love in a Blue Time

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.

Intimacy

‘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.

Hanif Kureishi Plays

In 1981 Hanif Kureishi was voted most promising playwright of the year by the London theater critics for his plays Borderline and Outskirts. Since then he has gone on to write acclaimed screenplays, including the script for My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay, and prize winning works of fiction. This selection of plays shows his development as a writer finding his own territory within the diverse ethnic and cultural milieus of 1990s England and illuminating the conflicts he finds with his characteristically powerful and humorous style.

Intimacy and Midnight All Day

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.

Collected Screenplays 1

This title contains a collection of the screenplays written by Hanif Kureishi. The plays include, ‘Sammy and Rosie Get Laid’, ‘London Kills Me’ and ‘My Son the Fanatic’.

The Body

‘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.

Ox-Tales: Earth

Ox-Tales is a set of four compelling and collectible books, each themed on one of the elements. Earth features stories by Rose Tremain, Jonathan Coe, Marti Leimbach, Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin, Marina Lewycka, Hanif Kureishi, Jonathan Buckley and Nicholas Shakespeare, and a poem by Vikram Seth.

The idea behind Ox-Tales is to raise money for Oxfam and along the way to highlight the charity’s work in project areas: agriculture in Earth, water projects in Water, conflict aid in Fire, and climate change in Air.

The Black Album with My Son the Fanatic

Long before Islamic fundamentalism became a household phrase, Hanif Kureishi began visiting mosques in London and witnessing the flocks of young Asians many of them second generation immigrants who were turning to Islam. Kureishi was perplexed by these young people, brought up in secular Britain but intent on choosing a strict religious code that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived. First published in 1995, The Black Album is Kureishi’s raucous, exuberant, and prophetic examination of this new phenomenon. His protagonist Shahid, from a Pakistani immigrant family, is perilously fond of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. A student at a dismal community college in London, he wants to please the conservative Muslims in the flat next door but is enthralled by the gorgeous Deedee Osgood, a radical, hard partying college professor with a penchant for sex in taxis. Also included in this new edition of The Black Album is ‘My Son the Fanatic,’ Kureishi’s brilliant short story, published in The New Yorker and made into an award winning film. ‘My Son the Fanatic’ reveals the shifting values between a father and son two generations of immigrants struggling between assimilation and separatist fundamentalism. Available together for the first time, The Black Album and ‘My Son the Fanatic’ are more timely and relevant than ever exhilarating and prescient writing from one of the most celebrated voices in British fiction and film.

RED

A gorgeous new Cecelia mini book which contains two powerful and unforgettable short stories. Girl in the Mirror Lila knows how lucky she is to have found the man of her dreams. But when a secret from her family’s past comes to light on her wedding day, her destiny changes in the most unexpected of ways! The Memory Maker They say you never forget your first love. But what happens when those cherished memories start to fade? Some people would do anything to hold on to the past and, for one heartbroken man, that means finding a way to relive those precious moments!

London Kills Me

A superb collection of screenplays and essays from the celebrated screenwriter of My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. This work includes the title screenplay, the scripts for his previous screenplays, and essays about the background of each film, the shooting and editing process, and the hilarity of the Academy Awards in Hollywood.

My Beautiful Laundrette

Described by Stuart Hall as ‘one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years,’ My Beautiful Laundrette was a significant production for its director Stephen Frears and its writer Hanif Kureshi. Christine Geraghty considers it a crossover film: between television and cinema, realism and fantasy, and as an independent film targeting a popular audience. She deftly shows how it has remained an important and timely film in the 1990s and early 2000s, and her exploration of the film itself is an original and entertaining achievement.

The Faber Book of Pop

Charting the course of pop from its underground origins, through its low and high art phases, out to the mainstream, this book takes in fiction, reportage, fashion, art and fantasy, as filtered through pop music. It includes work by authors such as Joe Orton, Roddy Doyle and Malcolm X.

My Ear at His Heart

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, and the moving discovery of family secrets. When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father’s his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father’s privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. This is a book about his father’s failed career as a writer and the beginnings of Kureishi’s successful career as one as his father looks on with pride and perhaps envy.

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, War With No End provides an urgent, necessary reflection on the causes and consequences of the ideological War on Terror.

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