Extraordinary, unique and unputdownable . . . an exceptional volume as original as Jean-Dominique Bauby’s stroke classic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [and] as profound and affected as Salman Rushdie’s Knife . . . This fall provoked a rare, and inspiring, defiance . . . Shattered, with its unique authorship, has become a life-saver. For the reader, this compounds the intensity of its witness -- Robert McCrum - Independent

A thoroughly compelling, and deeply harrowing, account of Kureishi’s life . . . few could write about it with the piercing candour and clarity that Kureishi has done. There is frustration, anger, sometimes despair, but not a trace of self-pity -- Mick Brown - Daily Telegraph

Raw and earnest . . . Kureishi’s fans will find Shattered wildly inspiring; his singular voice, his bawdy humour, his efforts to create meaning, all so characteristic and moving . . . I can’t wait to read everything he has to write -- Dina Nayeri - Guardian

An enthralling report on how a person can be forced to reckon with sudden, shocking change . . . Shattered is its own lifeline, and a neat exemplar of what we mean when we describe a book as ‘necessary’: its value for readers is at one with its urgency of expression to the human being drowning in the experience it attempts to redeem . . . It’s impossible not to read Shattered in a spirit of generosity and communion - Observer, 'Book of the Day'

Kureishi, a taboo-buster since his days as a punk-era playwright, has always hunted for the freedom, even joy, hiding on the other side of shame. He still does . . . Shattered trumpets the strength of his droll and trenchant voice above the ‘random evil stuff’ that ‘can happen to you at any time’ . . . His dispatches from the planet of paralysis draw on the good habits of a writing lifetime - clarity, comedy, courage, unshockable attentiveness - to depict a self, and a family, “smashed, remade and altered” . . . Only Kureishi could have rebuilt these pieces of a fractured life so well - Financial Times

[Shattered is] an authentic depiction of Kureishi’s whirring mind, particularly in the constant alternation of hope and despair . . . At one point, he sternly declares that writing is “not therapy for the writer but entertainment for the reader”. Yet, while the entertainment here is of a complicated kind, S