SOURCE: “Hanif Kureishi Makes an Excursion into Short Fiction,” in Chicago Tribune Books, December 28, 1997, p. 3.

In the following review, Ulin offers an overall unfavorable assessment of Love in a Blue Time, despite “the success of some pieces.”

Since the mid-1980s, Hanif Kureishi has chronicled the life of modern London in a variety of media, alternating among fiction, screenplays and stage plays with apparent ease. First recognized for his film My Beautiful Laundrette, in which the dual specters of British racism and homophobia were given a very human—and, at times, unsettlingly personal—face, Kureishi writes about a society transformed by post-colonialism, where the established order has yielded to something both uncertain and absurd. From Pakistani immigrants and suburban racists to ’60s refugees looking for one last, evanescent high, his characters tread the line between tragedy and comedy, occupying a murky middle territory where the disturbing and the...