My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father Book

Described by The New York Times Magazine as a "postcolonial Philip Roth," Hanif Kureishi first captured the attention of audiences and critics in the 1980s with award-winning works, such as the novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the film My Beautiful Laundrette . Now, after discovering an abandoned manuscript of his father's, hidden for years, Kureishi was compelled to write this moving memoir. Like Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Geoffrey Wolfe, who also have written books about their fathers, Kureishi wanted to understand and perhaps to reconcile..

My Ear at His Heart offers remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, chronicling how Kureishi's own literary calling emerged from the ashes of his father's aspirations. And so begins a journey that takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay to his modest adult life as a British civil servant—his days spent in the Pakistan Embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition..

"A beguiling and complex tale of fact, fiction, and family tensions" ( The Guardian ), this is a profound work from one of the most compelling artists of our time. My Ear at His Heart won the prestigious Prix d'Entranger in France, the highest award given to a non-French book. .