Are You With Me Now? by Hanif Kureishi review – back to basics

After his catastrophic accident, the rebel writer’s musings on everything from sex chatbots to film stars have become gloriously unleashed

Some months after returning home, after a grim year in hospitals in Rome and London, Hanif Kureishi begins to rebel. Not against his family, or the physical reality of being tetraplegic (and how could he?), but the liberal homogeneity of Shepherd’s Bush. He gets a diamond stud in his left ear at Westfield shopping centre, a piercing that enraged his father when he was 17. He sends off for a Maga cap and wears both to the farmers’ market, hoping for vitriol but getting nothing. “These quiescent scumbags only cared about themselves and their shopping,” he grumbles. “Being a fascist is far less thrilling than I imagined.”