Are You with Me Now

The follow-up to Hanif Kureishi’s extraordinary hospital memoir, Shattered, this is the story of what came next – a year of living at home in London after paralysis, told through scenes of carers, physio, insomnia, sex, money, football, film sets, festivals and family.

The song ‘Are You with Me Now?’ was a regular soundtrack to the drives Hanif and partner Isabella would take from Rome to her mother’s house on the Amalfi Coast, both of them singing along as they skirted the Bay of Naples, in the time before the accident which paralysed him.

This book takes its title from that music – and it is a question that has now become more urgent and more complex. Beginning with this memory of the past and ending with his marriage to Isabella and his first faltering steps, Hanif Kureishi, with son Carlo, charts how a writer, a couple and a family adapt to disability – through arguments and jokes, memories of lovers and friends, and a new way of working word by word at the kitchen table.

Are You With Me Now? is a fiercely funny, unflinching account of survival – and of creativity, desire and companionship persisting when the body, and conventional life, fall apart.