“Dear followers,” Hanif Kureishi tweeted in January, “I should like you to know that on Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.”    

The 68-year-old British novelist who grew up in Bromley, southeast London, updated fans in a shocking Twitter thread, detailing the mysterious injury, from which he woke up in a pool of blood. He recalled seeing “a scooped, semicircular object with talons attached” scuttling towards him, only to realise in the midst of his confusion that this was his hand, “an uncanny object over which I had no agency”...

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