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Salman Rushdie to publish memoir KNIFE

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Extract: Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

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The Vintage Podcast with Salman Rushdie at 70

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Reading guide: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

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The Vintage Podcast: Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights – off the page

The iconic Booker-prize winning novel, from bestselling author Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children

A special edition of the booker-prize winning novel

A beautiful hardback edition of a modern Indian classic and winner of 'The Best of the Booker' - the best novel from Booker Prize history. 
 
Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious. 
 
'A wonderful, rich and humane novel that is safe to call a classic' Guardian 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Essays 2003-2020

Languages of Truth

From 'Best of the Booker' winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture. 
 
'One of the greatest writers of our age' Neil Gaiman 
 
Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, he shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Rushdie considers, too, the nature of truth and looks afresh at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. 
 
'Essential reading... Powerful' Financial Times 
 
'Rushdie is vital, expansive, the critic as storyteller, championing his subjects with gusto' TLS

Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest writers of our age; he is a giant of literature.

Rushdie is vital, expansive, the critic as storyteller, championing his subjects with gusto... Rushdie is a still a writer to be reckoned with.

Powerful... Languages of Truth feels like essential reading in this time, reminding us that the stories we have told each other over millennia are universal, even if this shared heritage is often lost or forgotten in today's angry, fractured world.

Probably the best nonfiction he [Rushdie] has written in years... Rushdie is happy to record just what he sees and feels. You sense that he has arrived somewhere new...a sign of good things to come.

Rushdie's writing is erudite and full of sympathy, brimming with insight and wit . . . Fans will be delighted . . . [A] mesmerizing collection.

Wide-ranging nonfiction pieces by the distinguished novelist, unified by his commitment to artistic freedom and his adamant opposition to censorship in any form . . . Formidably erudite, engagingly passionate, and endlessly informative: a literary treat.

Enchanting reading... Rushdie is worth listening to.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Haroun's father is the greatest of all storytellers. His magical stories bring laughter to the sad city of Alifbay. 
 
But one day something goes wrong and his father runs out of stories to tell. 
 
Haroun is determined to return the storyteller's gift to his father. So he flies off on the back of the Hoopie bird to the Sea of Stories - and a fantastic adventure begins.

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Quichotte

***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*** 
 
 
In a tour-de-force that is a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age. 
 
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 the TV star Salman R. 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. 
 
Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse, with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work. The fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

The epic new novel from the Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie – a playful inversion of Don Quixote set in contemporary America.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE** 
 
**SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age. 
 
 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 the TV star Salman R. 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. 
 
 Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse, with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work. The fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Rushdie is one of the greats of his generation… But it’s rare for a writer to produce their best work towards the end of their career… Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism… This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot… Encore! Encore!

A brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder… His readers realize that they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of the world… a glimmer of hope, like an impossible dream, is left for us [in Quichotte].

A triumphant assault on the coarsened American sensibility… [A] packed, funny, melancholy, masterpiece of a novel.

A novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys... More than just another postmodern box of tricks, [Quichotte] is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.

Rushdie’s fans will find much to love in this hyperactive, tenchicolour satire… Many balls are juggles here, but, somehow, Rushdie keeps them all gloriously in the air.

Quichotte is cleverly plotted and compellingly paced, a constant reminder that precious few writers can manoeuvre a sentence like Rushdie, and a moving story about love and the importance of family too… In other words, Quichotte is a sort of manifesto about the power of fiction.

A fast-spinning postmodern double Catherine wheel – impossible not to be dazzled by… exhilarating.

This is the Rushdie we still need: eviscerator of the powers-that-be, who destroys rather than creates illusions... Here is a language adequate to our times.

Very much a Don Quixote for our times… a wild, enjoyable ride.

[A] modern Don Quixote... Rushdie has created something that feels wholly original even if you’ve never heard of the hopelessly romantic Spanish knight-errant who sees danger in windmills... Lucky for us, there are true storytellers and Rushdie is near the top of that list. If you haven’t read him before, this is a good book to start with—it’s fabulist and funny while revealing an awful lot about the world we live in today.

A delightful confection… Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.

Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted fourteenth novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination... You can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse.

[Quichotte] is Don Quixote for our time, a smart satire of every aspect of the contemporary culture. Witty, profound, tender, this love story shows a fiction master at his brilliant best.

Quichotte overwhelms you from the first page with a lightning storm of ideas and a monsoon of exuberant prose… Quichotte has all the verbal pyrotechnics and outlandish invention that will be familiar to readers of Rushdie’s fourteen previous novels, but at the heart it is a serious and affecting tale about the irresistible pull of history… those who are prepared to sit back and enjoy the ride will encounter scenery like none they have ever seen.

Nothing but extraordinary... This incisively outlandish but lyrical meditation on intolerance, TV addiction, and the opioid crisis operates on multiple planes, with razor-sharp topicality and humor, delivering a reflective examination of the plight of marginalized personhood with veritable aplomb. Highly recommended.

Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope... Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie.

Rushdie’s rambunctious latest... [is an] uproarious comedy… a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times.

A genre-hopping, cross-country picaresque which rips along with a great deal of wit, verve and empathy.

Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials.

This sardonic portrait of America combines exuberant humour with sober reflections on the toxic excesses of 21st-century media.

Rushdie’s most personal novel for years… a truly imaginative response to his own experience of exile and dislocation.

Quichotte is funny… beautiful, lucid prose.

About a dozen pages into Quichotte, Salman Rushdie’s 14th novel, we read of an invention so devious, so outrageous, that it dispels any thought that the author’s imaginative powers might be waning… It’s a masterstroke in an uneven but diverting and occasionally brilliant novel… [and] a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.

Now in his eighth decade, it is clear he [Rushdie] still possesses the linguistic energy, resourcefulness and sheer amplitude of a writer half his age – buoyant and life-enhancing qualities shared by his great Spanish predecessor [Cervantes]

Rushdie’s novel is many things beyond just a Don Quixote retelling. It’s a satire on our contemporary fake-news, post-truth, Trumpian cultural moment, where the concept of reality itself is coming apart. It’s a sci-fi novel, a spy novel, a road trip novel, a work of magical realism. It’s a climate change parable, and an immigrant story in an era of anti-immigration feeling. It’s a love story that turns into a family drama... Characters, narratives and worlds collide and come apart in spectacular fashion, while Rushdie maintains an exhilarating control over it all.

A meditation on life, death and the stories told about both.

The fiction about fiction that takes the breath away… Quichotte expertly does it again.

Funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero… [Quichotte is] compelling.

Rushdie is a master storyteller who weaves his fictions and characters into such agreeable tapestries.

The novel's dazzling virtuosity and cascade of cultural references culminate in a final moving moment of hope

The Golden House

**New York Times bestseller** 
A Guardian / Observer Book of the Year 
 
When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. 
 
The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour and confidant, René, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject. René chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder, and far away, in their abandoned homeland, some decent intelligence work. 
 
Invoking literature, pop culture, and the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat: the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, and, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up and with coloured hair. 
 
In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies. A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world’s greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers.

**New York Times bestseller** 
A Guardian / Observer Book of the Year 
 
One of the truly great writers of the century at the top of his game in this uncannily timely knockout of a novel.

**New York Times bestseller** 
 
 'One of the most vivid and convincing portraits of contemporary America I've read' Observer 
 
 When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. 
 
 The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour and confidant, René, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject. René chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder, and far away, in their abandoned homeland, some decent intelligence work. 
 
 In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies. A brilliant, heart-breaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world's greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers.

It’s one of the most vivid and convincing portraits of contemporary America I’ve read.

[A] complex and witty fable … Rushdie has always been an impish myth-manipulator, refusing to accept, as in this novel, that the lives of the emperors can’t be blended with film noir, popular culture and crime caper. On the evidence of The Golden House, he is quite right.

Unruly but exuberant… Much of the success of The Golden House, in fact, lies in its humour and in the vigour of its storytelling… There is a glowing energy to the prose that makes this Rushdie’s most enjoyable, mischievous and American of novels.

Intelligent and darkly funny...with a raw political edge.

Rushdie writes with a Dickensian exuberance, always full of humour as well as striking scornful, tragic notes. Often he plays the role of satirist. His caricatures and outsize figures are full of life, wickedness and human energy: again, as in Dickens, grounded in a precise social and political scene.

Rushdie’s fable is a sprightly portrait of American life from Obama’s election to the rise of Trump.

Where Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities sent up the go-go, me-me Reagan/Bush era, Rushdie’s latest novel captures the existential uncertainties of the anxious Obama years... A sort of Great Gatsby for our time: everyone is implicated, no one is innocent, and no one comes out unscathed.

A ravishingly well-told, deeply knowledgeable, magnificently insightful, and righteously outraged epic which pos&shy;es timeless questions about the human condition... As Rushdie’s blazing tale surges toward its crescendo, life, as it always has, rises stubbornly from the ashes, as does love.

Salman Rushdie is a writer of illimitable imagination and verbal ingenuity. He grips us with wild storylines, takes us on flights of fancy, brings us back down again, enthralled and dazed… The terrorist attacks by Islamicists, the unplanned developments, the bribery and corruption and multiple tragedies are gritty, real and moving. Extreme scenes are written so beautifully I don’t think I will ever forget them… The Golden House is an extraordinary book, a brooding meditation on the personal and political, on ethics, egotism, freedom and interdependence.

This is a compelling thriller with a pinch of fantasy, populated by larger-than-life characters… This powerfully cinematic novel, enriched by references to literature, popular culture and film, is dense, detailed and rewarding, displaying one of our leading novelists at the top of his game.

For all of The Golden House’s folkloric architecture and twinkling prose, for all its impish cartoonery and exuberant storytelling, the novel is at its heart an unsettling portrait of the state of humanity in the United States of 2017. It celebrates our meager glories and exposes our flaws, particularly our inability to see outside of our own little cocoons, whether they be constructed of silk or some coarser material.

His prose is just as often a pleasure, bursting with colour and texture… The result stands as Rushdie’s most vital book in years, and perhaps the first protest novel of the Trump era.

A typically bold and all-encompassing saga.

Rushdie is, as ever, excellent in conveying bitter, personal anger.

Two decades after Rushdie transplanted himself to the US, one of the major pleasures of this novel is the way in which he considers the mores of the one per cent of the one per cent. Rushdie writes about the Goldens’ glittering, private world with innumerable perfect details, down to the art hanging on the walls… It will be a long four years, but fictional protests are unlikely to be as electric as this.

Hugely entertaining… Told against a backdrop of American politics and culture between Obama’s inauguration and the 2016 presidential election, it’s an extraordinarily powerful tale of our times.

[The Golden House] is a recognizably Rushdie novel in its playfulness, its verbal jousting, its audacious bravado, its unapologetic erudition, and its sheer, dazzling brilliance.

The Golden House is a searing examination of modern America and the world around it since 2008… Through the density of his intermingling literary references, puzzles and (deliberately) fanciful plot, comes Rushdie's true success: His great ability to capture the devilish mood of post-crash greed, political upheaval, and the rejection of the cosmopolitan, liberal west.

Rushdie’s prose is beyond much reprieve—there are few contemporary artists who come to mind that possess his ability to craft sentences. In this regard, The Golden House, his latest novel, is no exception... The Golden House is a joy to read… It’s hard to not have fun reading writing at Rushdie’s level of craftsmanship. It’s clever, intimidating, jocund, and electrifying.

The Golden House is not Brideshead or Gatsby – it is too rich and too riotous. Rather it is a modern Bonfire of the Vanities, New York seen from the inside and the outside, as only a writer of multiple selves such as Rushdie – Indian, British, now a New Yorker – could do.

Rushdie’s story is a morality tale which unfolds with great verve and erudition, missing no opportunity to pillory Donald Trump with its withering contempt.

No-one spins a yarn like Rushdie, and The Golden House’s tale of bastard sons, mysterious men and submerged pasts is hugely enjoyable… To say The Golden House is 'only' hugely enjoyable is a little like writing 'only' on a cheque for £1 million.

Salman Rushdie has garaged the magic carpets and dived deep into 21st-century America, with its concerns about identity, guns, the 1 percent and even superheroes.

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Midnight’s Children

'Radio drama of the year' - Gillian Reynolds, The Telegraph 
 
Nikesh Patel stars as Saleem in BBC Radio 4’s epic dramatisation of Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning novel of love, history and magic 
 
Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of midnight on 14th-15th August 1947, at the exact moment that India and Pakistan become separate, independent nations. From that moment on, his fate is mysteriously handcuffed to the history of his country. 
 
But Saleem’s story starts almost thirty years earlier, when his grandfather, Dr Aadam Aziz, falls in love with a woman concealed behind a perforated sheet. That pivotal moment in Kashmir in 1919 sparks a series of bizarre events that will lead to a cryptic prophecy and the birth of a boy with an extraordinary destiny. 
 
As a ‘Midnight’s Child’, Saleem has magical powers, and can telepathically tune in to all the other gifted children whose birth coincided with India’s division. However, his strange entanglement with the fate of India will have dramatic repercussions for both him and his country… 
 
Adapted by Ayeesha Menon, this dazzling dramatisation of Rushdie’s many-layered, magical realist masterpiece is both an enthralling family saga and a riveting history of post-colonialism. First broadcast to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India, it features Nikesh Patel as Saleem, with a star cast including Abhin Galeya, Meera Syal, Anneika Rose and Narinder Samra. 
 
Also included is an interview with Salman Rushdie, in which the author talks to radio drama director Emma Harding about his multi-award winning novel. 
 
Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, and was subsequently awarded the 'Booker of Bookers' prize in 1993 and 'The Best of the Booker' prize in 2008.

A brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Salman Rushdie's contemporary classic.

Salman Rushdie (Author) Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022. Meera Syal (Reader) Meera Syal, CBE, is one of our most acclaimed actors and writers of stage and screen. She starred in the hit series The Kumars at No. 42 and recently in the BBC film of David Walliams' The Boy in the Dress. She is currently in David Hare's play Behind the Beautiful Forevers at the National Theatre, and in the latest series of Broadchurch. Meera is also known for her funny, sharp and provocative fiction. Her two earlier novels are Anita and Me (a national curriculum set text) and Life Isn't all Ha Ha Hee Hee. The House of Hidden Mothers is her long-awaited third novel.

Salman Rushdie

The new novel from the Booker prize-winning, bestselling author of Midnight’s Children

She will whisper an empire into existence - but all stories have a way of getting away from their creators . . . 
 
'A total pleasure' 
SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Shows once again why his work will always matter' 
NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'Rushdie still has the gift of alchemy' 
FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
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 a goddess, who tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga - literally 'victory city' - the wonder of the world. 
 
Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's as she attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and as years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, Bisnaga is no exception.

Victory City

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From Midnight’s Children to Quichotte, here are the best books to begin your journey into Rushdie’s impressive oeuvre.

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Books by Salman Rushdie