Book description
The Black Album is the second novel by Hanif Kureishi, one of the
most praised and influential writers of our times. It is set in London
in 1989, the year after the second acid-fuelled 'summer of love' -
also the year in which the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his infamous
fatwa upon Salman Rushdie. The Black Album is a portrait of a young
Asian man being pulled in conflicting directions: one way by the lure
of sexual and hallucinogenic hedonism, another by the austere
certitudes of Islam. Shahid Hasan, a clean-cut kid from the provinces,
comes to London after the death of his father. He makes his home in a
Kilburn bedsit, falls in love with postmodernist college lecturer
Deedee Osgood, and soon finds himself passionately embroiled in a
spiritual battle between liberalism and fundamentalism.
Hanif Kureishi is the author of novels (including The Buddha of
Suburbia, The Black Album and most recently Something to Tell You),
story collections (Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body),
plays (including Outskirts, Borderline and Sleep With Me), and
screenplays (including My Beautiful Laundrette, My Son the Fanatic and
Venus). Among his other publications are the collection of essays
Dreaming and Scheming, The Word and the Bomb and the memoir My Ear at
his Heart.
