Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. 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.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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Discover Salman Rushdie’s critically acclaimed magical realist study of good and evil. 
 
'A masterpiece' Sunday Times 
 
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a plane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices. 
 
Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation? 
 
'A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling' V.S. Pritchett

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. 
 
Selected from the books Shame, Imaginary Homelands and East, West by Salman Rushdie 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
 Love by Jeanette Winterson 
Liberty by Virginia Woolf 
Race by Toni Morrison 
 Sisters by Louisa May Alcott

Home

Vintage Minis

‘Salman Rushdie's greatest novel’ Sunday Times 
 
Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby is the last in line of a crooked and fantastical dynasty of spice merchants and crime lords from Cochin. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As we travel with him on a route that takes him from India to Spain, he spins his labyrinthine family tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. 
 
But does the India of his parents – populated by extravagant artists, piratical gatekeepers and mysterious lost paintings – still exist? And will he ever discover what became of his fiery and tempestuous mother? Moraes’ epic quest to uncover the truth of the past is a love story to a vanishing world, and also its last hurrah. 
 
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

The Moor's Last Sigh

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic 
 
Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal. 
 
‘Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives’ The Times

Shame

The extraordinary literary debut of Salman Rushdie: ‘A firework of a book, funny and endlessly surprising’ Ursula Le Guin 
 
Flapping Eagle is a young Axona Indian gifted with immortal life after drinking an elixir from his wayward sister. But after 777 years of sailing the world’s seas, he becomes weary of life, and sets out to find the mystical Calf Island, a place where his fellow immortals have gathered and created their own version of the human race. 
 
But Calf Island is a strange place – like its inhabitants, it is both blessed and cursed. Sensing a terrible darkness at the heart of the island, Flapping Eagle sets out to scale the island’s peak and confront its mysterious and potent creator, Grimus himself. 
 
'A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present day... Grimus is a parallel form of life, and conjuring of an alternative society' Financial Times

Grimus

'A wonderful, rich and humane novel... a classic' Guardian 
 
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. 
 
*WINNER OF THE BOOKER AND BEST OF THE BOOKER PRIZE* 
 
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK** 
 
WITH A NEW 40TH ANNIVERSARY INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Midnight's Children

A special edition of the booker-prize winning novel

Angela Carter

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SALMAN RUSHDIE 
 
As well as her eight novels, Angela Carter published four wonderful collections of short stories during her lifetime, and contributed stories to several anthologies. The stories were scattered amongst different publishers, and a couple of the volumes are now out of print. In Burning your Boats they are gathered for the first time; this is a key collection and a major event for Angela Carter aficionados.

Burning Your Boats

Collected Short Stories

Saadat Hasan Manto

A rebellious yet human portrait of India's bustling Bombay, as told by one of the greatest Urdu writers of the last century: Saadat Hasan Manto. 
 
'The undisputed master of the modern Indian short story' Salman Rushdie, Observer 
 
In the 1930s and 40s, Bombay was the cosmopolitan capital of the subcontinent - an exhilarating hub of license and liberty, bursting with both creative energy and helpless degradation. It was also muse to the celebrated short story writer of India and Pakistan, Saadat Hasan Manto. 
 
Manto's hard-edged, moving stories remain, a hundred years after his birth, startling and provocative. In searching out those forgotten by humanity - prostitutes, conmen and crooks - Manto wrote about what it means to be human.

Bombay Stories

Italo Calvino

'I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends' Salman Rushdie 
 
From the age of twelve, the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond, living up in the trees. He walks through paths made from the twisted branches of olive, makes his bed in a holly oak, bathes in a fountain constructed from poplar bark. An aerial library holds the books with which he educates himself in philosophy and mathematics. Suspended among the leaves, the Baron adventures with bandits and pirates, conducts a passionate love affair, and watches the Age of Enlightenment pass by beneath him. 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

The Baron in the Trees

Xiaolu Guo

Have you ever tried to learn another language? When Zhuang first arrives in London from China she feels like she is among an alien species. The city is disorientating, the people unfriendly, the language a muddle of personal pronouns and moody verbs. But with increasing fluency in English surviving turns to living. And they say that the best way to learn a language is to fall in love with a native speaker… 
 
Selected from the book A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Babies by Anne Enright 
 Depression by William Styron 
 Race by Toni Morrison 
 Home by Salman Rushdie

Language

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave’s utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption… 
 
Selected from Irvine Welsh's novel Ecstasy. 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Dreams by Sigmund Freud 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Work by Joseph Heller

Rave

Marcel Proust

Can we truly know the one we love? In this painfully candid book Marcel Proust looks straight into the green eye of every lover’s jealous struggle. He broods on why we are driven to try possess one another, how jealousy can outlive death, and whether we can ever reclaim those careless days of first love. There is no greater chronicler of jealousy’s darkest fears and destructive suspicions than Proust. 
 
Selected from the book In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Desire by Haruki Murakami 
Eating by Nigella Lawson 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Babies by Anne Enright

Jealousy

Raymond Carver

The unparalleled short story collection by the great Raymond Carver, master of spare, powerful prose and one of the great American short story writers. 
 
This powerful collection of stories is set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. In the opening story a man whose wife and children have left him, rearranges all his furniture on the lawn. And in each subsequent story sadness, pain and drudgery propel the characters towards their fate. But through the darkness, vivid colloquial narration and a razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate illuminate all the comedy and tragedy of ordinary life. 
 
‘The master craftsman of the modern American short story’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘One of America's most original, truest voices’ Salman Rushdie 
 
'The most celebrated story collection from one of the true American masters' New York Review of Books

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Halldór Laxness

The great Icelandic novel written by a Nobel prize-winner, this is a magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man's dogged struggle for independence. 
 
‘In Iceland it’s the canon, but to me it’s a cult classic’ Zadie Smith 
 
‘I defy anyone to finish Halldór Laxness's Independent People without wetting the pages with tears’ Jonathan Franzen 
 
‘Favourite book? Independent People… I love it’ Ann Patchett 
 
Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land in rural Iceland. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever. 
 
‘A masterpiece’ David Mitchell 
‘It moved me immensely’ Barbara Kingsolver 
‘One of the great novels’ Ian McEwan 
‘Funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant’ Annie Proulx 
‘A great Icelandic novel…It’s an epic’ Max Porter 
‘An amazing book… A stunning piece of work’ Cillian Murphy 
'Laxness is a magnificent writer' Salman Rushdie 
'Laxness’ contribution to both Icelandic and world literature cannot be overstated' Andrey Kurkov

Independent People

R K Narayan

Discover one of India's most valued and adored twentieth-century novelists, including his novel Swami and Friends. 
 
Here are three of R. K. Narayan's most famous and best loved novels: Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. All set in the imaginary Indian town of Malgudi, these irresistible works provide the perfect introduction to a universal world of humour, sadness, wisdom and joy. 
 
 **Featuring one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

A Malgudi Omnibus

Krishna, an English teacher in the town of Malgudi, nagged by the feeling he's doing the wrong work, is nonetheless delighted by his domestic life, where his wife and young daughter wait for him outside the house every afternoon. Devastated by the death of his wife, Krishna comes to realise what he really wants to do, and makes a decision that will change his life forever.

The English Teacher

The first that indolent young Sriram knows about Mahatma Ghandi's visit to Malgudi is when a collection box is waved beneath his nose by the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. The vision's name is Bharato. Capable and quick-witted, her scorn for her gauche but ardent admirer is almost equal to her devotion to the Mahatma. Yet that is how Sriram leaves Malgudi to become a passionate apostle of the Quit India campaign - only to find his convictions tested by the rigours of a prison cell.

Waiting For The Mahatma

Anita Desai

Hugo Baumgartner is a man who doesn’t belong anywhere. He's a Berlin Jew who travelled to India to escape the Nazis and, after years spent the mercy of his past and his tumultuous adopted land, he has now retired to a seedy cat-filled apartment behind Bombay's Taj Hotel. But destiny has not finished with Baumgartner, in this haunting tale of the afflictions of exile.

Baumgartner's Bombay

Assuming the character of a wise village storyteller, R K Narayan sits in the cool of an imaginary evening to recount the tales of the centuries.Taken from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and other Indian epics, the gods and demons, saints and sinners assume their symbolic and philosophical roles without ever losing their human characteristics. It is a measure of the author's achievement that he so subtly imbues them with his own distinctive wit and vision.This book is illustrated throughout by Narayan's brother R K Laxman, with woodcuts based on temple carvings.

Gods Demons And Others

George Saunders

THE 2017 MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF LINCOLN IN THE BARDO 
 
In his first collection, George Saunders' vision of our near future is as black and funny as you can get. He takes us on a trip to the shopping malls and theme parks and enviromental hazards that lie just around the chronological corner, introducing us to a gang of misfits and losers struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. Bizarre but familiar, fierce but always humane, these are stunningly original stories by a master of the form. 
 
'Saunders is a morally passionate, serious writer, who perfectly expresses the madness of the times we live in. He will be read long after these times have passed' Zadie Smith 
 
'He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him' Jonathan Franzen 
 
'There is no-one better, no-one more essential' Dave Eggers

Civilwarland In Bad Decline

Ten-year-old Swaminathan is living in exciting times. The sleeping giant of India is beginning to stir to the dwelling reverberations which herald the great struggle for independence. But it's all rather confusing for the boy. For like his family and friends, Swami has been immutably moulded by his British rulers - and though he might happily demonstrate against them, he wouldn't dream of missing cricket practice.

Swami And Friends

In the shade of a banyan tree sits Margayva, self-styled advisor on the complex minor transactions which are an integral part of Indian life. Who else would you consult if you wanted a loan from the local Co-operative Bank?But a scrape with officialdom in the form of an unplanned interview with the Bank's Secretary - and a mishap which finds his spoilt son Balu throwing his accounts book down a drain - temporarily cuts short a lucrative career.

The Financial Expert

Alfred Assollant

Introducing the Marvellous Captain Corcoran – he is charming to ladies, courteous to true gentlemen, death to pirates and merciless to the English. He speaks several languages, can bend an iron bar with his bare hands, and has adventured his way across the seven seas with his faithful friend Louison by his side. Loyal only to her master, Louison can be a little boisterous, and there’s devil to pay when she misses a meal (she is a tiger, after all). 
 
Corcoran is on the hunt for a lost sacred Hindu text. Once in India, he is soon distracted from his quest by the claims of Prince Holkar, his lotus-eyed daughter, and their daring stand against the English occupying forces. 
 
Beloved by many French schoolchildren (including the young Jean-Paul Sartre) at the turn of the century, the marvellous Corcoran has been too long forgotten. Sam Miller (author of Strange Kind of Paradise: India through Foreign Eyes) has loving translated these wild, funny, unabashedly romantic adventures from the French for the first time so that the Captain and his charming Louison can be embraced by a new generation of readers, young and old.

The Marvellous (But Authentic) Adventures of Captain Corcoran

Joseph Heller

On paper, Bruce Gold seems to have carved a comfortable niche for himself. But in the flesh, he's not so impressive. His ancient father thinks he's a fool, his children fail to notice him and even his wife doesn't realise he's no longer living with her. Gold's been promised a prestigious government post in Washington - only he's never been told what the position actually is. Hugely funny and sweetly sad, Good as Gold is the story of children grown up, parents grown old, anad lovers grown apart.

Good As Gold

Rudyard Kipling

'No summary can do this marvellous, rich and unforgettable novel anything like justice' Philip Pullman 
 
Kim is an orphan who earns his living begging on the streets of Lahore. One day he befriends an aged Tibetan Lama who, although content to live simply in India, is a rich and powerful abbot in his own country. When the Lama recruits Kim as a disciple and then funds his education at an English public school an adventure begins that will take the unlikely pair to the Himalayas on a thrilling journey of espionage and enlightenment. 
 
'The greatest of all Kipling's books' E. M. Forster

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1999 BOOKER PRIZE 
 
Uma, the plain, spinster daughter of a close-knit Indian family, is trapped at home, smothered by her overbearing parents and their traditions, unlike her ambitious younger sister Aruna, who brings off a 'good' marriage, and brother Arun, the disappointing son and heir who is studying in America. 
 
Across the world in Massachusetts, life with the Patton family is bewildering for Arun in the alien culture of freedom, freezers and paradoxically self-denying self-indulgence.

Fasting, Feasting

Graham Greene

'The novel that I love the most is The Quiet American' Ian McEwan, Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons 
 
Into the intrigue and violence of 1950s Saigon comes CIA agent Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'. 
 
As Pyle's naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as Fowler intervenes he wonders why: for the greater good, or something altogether more complicated? 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

The Quiet American

Discover Graham Green’s prescient political masterpiece

To the family living in the shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp reminder of life outside tradition. For Bim, coping endlessly with their problems, there is a renewal of the old jealousies for, unlike her sister, she has failed to escape. Looking at both the cruelty and the beauty of family life and the harshness of India's modern history, Clear Light of Day brilliantly evokes the painful process of confronting and healing old wounds.

Clear Light of Day

Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote extraordinary short stories. Here some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li. 
 
Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. 
 
Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before. 
 
‘No twentieth-century writer had a subtler mind for human comparison’ Zadie Smith 
 
‘Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature’ John le Carré 
 
'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph 
 
‘A superb storyteller’ New York Times 
 
‘One of the finest writers of any language’ Washington Post 
 
‘One of our greatest authors’ Independent 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI

Duel Duet

Selected Stories

Chandran is a good-natured, popular, rather dreamy student who works hard to pass his exams. Newly graduated, he is unsure how he wants to spend his future. And then, one evening, walking by the river, he sees Malathi, a beautiful young girl dressed in a radiant green sari  But the course of love does not run smoothly. Not all is well in Chandran's horoscope and while some customs can be forgotten, others must be strictly observed: customs that temporarily cause Chandran to turn his back on the legendary Malgudi altogether.

The Bachelor Of Arts

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