A Guide to Salman Rushdie Books

The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries. Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, Victory City is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.

Newly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction from the first two decades of the twenty-first century — including many texts never previously in print. Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. He brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship to the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder” (Time).

A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture — a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

A spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.

Secular moneylender and manic collector of treasures, Hashim lives a life of gentle honor until he discovers, washed up to his private quay, a great relic: A silver pendant bearing a strand of the Prophet’s hair.

Set in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdie’s classic children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. Haroun, a 12-year-old boy sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.

On February 14, 1989, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been “sentenced to death” by the Ayatollah Khomeini. So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov — Joseph Anton.

The adventure begins when Luka’s father, Rashid, falls suddenly into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one can rouse him. To save him from slipping away entirely, Luka embarks on a journey through the world of magic with his loyal companions, Bear, the dog, and Dog, the bear. Together they encounter a slew of fantastical creatures, strange allies, and challenging obstacles along the way — all in the hope of stealing the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and exceedingly treacherous task.

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. Profoundly moving and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers.

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. “[A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions. In this spectacular novel, verbal pyrotechnics barely outshine its psychological truths” (Newsday). A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is 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, shame: The roots of violence.” Shame is an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.

“I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: But my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice.” In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of “ a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision.” Recounting his travels there in 1986, in the midst of America’s behind-the-scenes war against the Sandinistas, Rushdie reveals a nation resounding to the clashes between government and individuals, history and morality.

This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, America’s counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown; Max’s illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation finally explains them all. “Dazzling … Modern thriller, Ramayan epic, courtroom drama, slapstick comedy, wartime adventure, political satire, village legend — they’re all blended here magnificently” (The Washington Post Book World).

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

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. Salman Rushdie’s celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago.

With astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in this book chronicle a ten-year intellectual odyssey by one of the most important, creative, and respected minds of our time. This collection is, in Rushdie’s words, a “wake-up call” about the way we live, and think, now.

Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There’s a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America’s wealth and power, seeking to “erase” himself. But fury is all around him. An astonishing work of explosive energy, Fury is by turns a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a love story of mesmerizing force, and a disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature.

The Moor’s Last Sigh combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love.

These nine stories reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical, and humane, this book renews Rushdie’s stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence.

Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here cover an astonishing range of subjects — the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.