The world of psychoanalysis that Hanif Kureishi explores in his latest novel, Something to Tell You, is seemingly populated with the strange and the weird. However, we soon learn that there is no such thing as normal. Jamal Khan appears to be a straight-laced psychoanalyst, but the more we learn, the more he comes to resemble the clients he serves. From his childhood in a broken home, to his time as a university student living on the borders of radical politics and London’s fringe underbelly, and finally to his middle age, in which he’s equally at home in the worlds of high society, whorehouses and down-at-heel pubs. Throughout it all, Jamal narrates the genesis of his career in psychoanalysis. He tells of the long and winding road of family and personal crises and, ultimately, how the needs and talents that enable him to thrive in the medical community are, at times, the same things that hold him back in his personal life.

Something to Tell You is also a rumination on life in Tony Blair’s London. Jamal often spends his lunch hour wandering, and an interior monologue allows us to eavesdrop as he travels about the city — having lunches with friends and ex-lovers, popping in on an M. Ward show, or trudging in the rain through one of London’s last green spaces. In this respect, Kureishi uses Something To Tell You to bookend his early account of life in London, The Buddha of Suburbia.

The dominant themes of the novel, however, are love and guilt. Jamal, divorced from his wife, finds himself stalled and renewing old relationships. A chance encounter brings back the memory of his first love, Ajita, the daughter of a wealthy textiles manufacturer. As idyllic as their relationship was throughout their university days, it was cut short when Ajita’s family was forced to relocate to India after her father died of a heart attack during a prolonged workers’ strike. The incident, which has long haunted Jamal, ought to be the axis on which the book pivots, what with the narrator being a psychoanalyst, but never really manifests. The memory of Ajita’s father also raises the spectre of Jamal’s own estranged dad, a figure who darkens Jamal’s relationship with his sister, Miriam. She is one of Kureishi’s more memorable characters, with numerous piercings, a large physical frame and a home that operates as the local flophouse.

With themes of love guilt, and shame mixed with Kureishi’s insider view of race relations in a city transformed by millennial wealth and on edge from wars and bombings, Something to Tell You is a welcome return to some of Kureishi’s best loved haunts and characters.