The Satanic Verses

Praise

“A staggering achievement, brilliantly enjoyable.”—Nadine Gordimer
 
“Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary . . . a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination.”—The Guardian
 
“A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb.”—The Times (London)
 
“The tone of the novel veers daringly from the slapstick to the melodramatic. . . . [Rushdie’s] conjuring tricks are magical. . . . personal and touching.”—The New York Times

“A glittering novelist—one with startling imagination and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling.”—The New Yorker

“This invites comparison with the miracle-laden narratives of Gabriel García Márquez. Highly recommend.”—Library Journal
 
“For Rushdie fans this is a splendid feast.”—Publishers Weekly

“An entertainment in the highest sense of that much-exploited word . . . a surreal hallucinatory feast . . . [Rushdie’s] inventiveness never flags.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Damnably entertaining and fiendishly ingenious. One of the very few current writers whose works are attempts at the great Bible, the ‘bright book of life.’”—London Review of Books

“A masterpiece.”—Sunday Times

“The Satanic Verses has all the excellences that made [Midnight’s Children] a publishing event: an epic sweep and feel for the larger currents of history reminiscent of Tolstoy, a comic genius for idiosyncratic characterization in polyphonic voices worthy of Dickens, together with the imaginative freedom of fabulation characteristic of Latin American fiction and its magical realism. The Satanic Verses [is] a wider ranging novel. Not since Gravity’s Rainbow has any novel so successfully captured the cosmopolitan texture of modern life. . . . Finally, The Satanic Verses confronts the problem of religion and modern life in such a direct and profound way that it has been banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, and all the Arab countries. . . . If you want to find out why Rushdie is arguably the most talented and significant author writing in the English language today, by all means read this book.”—The Virginia Quarterly Review