Hanif Kureishi and his interviewer Mark Lawson are both wearing black Nike trainers, and long professional acquaintance makes them as comfortable with each other as an old, expensive pair of shoes.

Just as in the United States, the quest among Indian authors in English to deliver the single, knock-out novel that would capture their country’s infinite variety has long been the stuff of parody. More than two decades ago, the writer-politician Shashi Tharoor published The Great Indian Novel.

Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless.

Saddam Hussein’s name is never mentioned in The President’s Gardens, even though he haunts every page. The one time that the reader encounters him directly, he is referred to simply by his title. In a novel of vivid pictures, the almost hallucinogenic image of the President turning the ornamental gardens around him into a bloodbath is one of the most unforgettable.

The news that Colm Tóibín has written a novel about Orestes, Clytemnestra, Electra and the whole accursed House of Atreus might prompt two instant responses. One could run: where does your man find the brass neck to compete with the titans of the past, from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides down to Richard Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, old Eugene O’Neill et al?

“I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” says a woman in “Scheherazade”, one of the most intriguing of the seven stories in Men without Women - it was previously published in the New Yorker, as were four of the others in the collection. Murakami is at his best when describing the extraordinary in his precise, simple prose (translated brilliantly by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) and making it feasible.

Kureishi is mostly loved for his bittersweet panoramas of suburban London, ribald and piquant with satire. The Nothing discards that broad canvas and creeps into a glittering chamber of ice, in which the only subjects are the dying urges of the manipulative, voyeuristic narcissist Waldo, told in brittle, epigrammatic style. All that’s left from Kureishi’s earlier fiction is the sex, and even that is desperate and third-hand.  

Shelve with Oliver Sacks. In Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found Bella Bathurst has written a fascinating and illuminating book on deafness. Of what it’s like to lose your hearing – and in her case regain it after a 12 long years. On the world of the deaf and the deafened. On loss – not just of the sense of hearing but of much to which it is allied, such as spacial awareness, and which we take for granted. On isolation, the feeling of being “stupid”, and of being consigned to the invisible world of the old.

Is it true that the blob of jelly resembling convoluted grey matter that we carry around in our skulls is really what we are? And how we are, and why? This is the profound question that is obliquely omnipresent in Henry Marsh’s second book on his life as a neurosurgeon as he describes his encounters with this physical part of us that seems to be, well, us. As he pithily puts it in his last pages, he does not believe in an afterlife: “I am a neurosurgeon.

The Arts Desk is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are plenty of private members club in central London, but The Hospital Club is uniquely a creative hub with its own television studio, gallery and performance space, which for certain events are open to non-members.