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. A tantalizingly told, artful, and elegant memoir - this is an unexpected delight from the novelist (The Buddha of Suburbia) and screenwriter (My Beautiful Landerette). Through its development, it is suffused with warmth and charm, illumined by the author''s wisdom and literacy. Kureishi is a Londoner, but his family came from Bombay - the cataclysm of partition ended their life of privilege, and Kureishi''s father wound up a minor official at the London Pakistan Embassy, with a modest home out in the suburbs. The father wrote and wrote unpublished novelizations of his life-story, and it is the discovery of manuscripts, the remnants of life-long literary ambitions, which catalyzes this moving and compelling tribute, wherein the son chronicles his development which has enabled him to attain the success that always eluded his father. This is a compelling, absorbing, and succinct masterwork. (Kirkus UK)