Salman Rushdie

"In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will...

Winner of England's prestigious Whitbread Ward, Rushdie's first novel in seven years is a peppery melange of genres: a deliciously inventive family saga; a subversive alternate history of modern India; a fairy tale as inexhaustibly imagined as any in The Arabian Nights; and a book of ideas on topics from art to ethnicity, from religious fanaticism to the terrifying power of love.

A hijacked jumbo jet bound for London blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures, Indian actors of opposing sensibilities, Gibreel and Saladin, fall to Earth, and are washed up on an English beach. Soon curious changes occur -Gibreel seems to have acquired a halo, while Saladin grows hooves and bumps at his temples. They are transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is the initial act in an odyssey that merges...

"Once upon a time, in a world just like ours, there came "the time of the strangenesses." Reason receded and the loudest, most illiberal voices reigned. A simple gardener began to levitate, and a powerful djinn -- also known as the Princess of Fairyland -- raised an army composed entirely of her semi-magical great-great-great-grandchildren. A baby was born with the ability to see corruption in the faces of others. The ghosts of two philosophers, long...

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan.” In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men–one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure–Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation–“shamelessness,...

The author of The Satanic Verses returns with his most humorous and accessible novel yet. This is the story of Haroun, a 12-year-old boy whose father Rashid is the greatest storyteller in a city so sad that it has forgotten its name. When the gift of gab suddenly deserts Rashid, Haroun sets out on an adventure to rescue his print. "Let in an exotic Eastern landscape people by magicians and talkning animals, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is the tale...

"Los Angeles, 1991. Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is murdered in broad daylight on his illegitimate daughter India's doorstep, slaughtered by a knife wielded by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, a myscerious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former US ambassador to India and subsequently America's...

Malik Solanka, a middle-aged ex-philosophy professor and millionaire creator of a hugely popular doll, seeks refuge from his unwanted fame and disintegrating marriage in New York City.

After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing-and ultimately the burden-of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island's peak, from which the mysterious...

Best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie offers incisive, often humorous takes on literature, culture and world events in this New York Times Notable Book. In these stimulating pieces, Rushdie addresses a variety of subjects, including the death of the novel, India, soccer and the Rolling Stones. "Sometimes pensive, sometimes marvelously funny, always lucid essays ... by the renowned Anglo-Indian novelist."-Kirkus Reviews, starred...