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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 was born and brought up in Kent. He read philosophy at King’s College, London. In 1981 he won the George Devine Award for his plays Outskirts and Borderline, and in 1982 he was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the Royal Court Theatre. In 1984 he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. His second screenplay Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) was…
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Watch the live stream of the our Faber Members event with Hanif Kureishi at the Bindery in London.
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