A cruel novel about an India-born, world-famous, possibly real-life author

It is six years since Hanif Kureishi’s last novel Something to Tell You, a kaleidoscopic meditation on life and death seen through the eyes of a Freudian analyst striving to make sense of middle age. It was regarded as a return to the highs of The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi’s first and still best-loved novel, populated by irresistible characters who ploughed through life with a feckless sexual voracity. The Last Word displays a similar chutzpah, although things are hampered by an unlikely story which over-sexualises every character in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a shabby country house.

The plot, which has Harry, an indolent young biographer, enter the West Country purdah of Mamoon, an eminent Indian-born writer, comes burdened by whispers that this is a fictional account of Patrick French’s commission to write the authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul. Indeed it is hard to think of the novel on its own terms as Harry unearths various accounts of a priapic sage whose relationships with women teeter on the edge of sexual sadism.