The Satanic Verses: Salman Rushdie - Softcover

Rushdie, Salman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0963270702 ISBN 13: 9780963270702

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked aeroplane 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?

About this title

Review:

No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a fatwa from Iran's Ayatollahs decreeing his death. Furore aside, it is a marvellously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's astonishing powers of invention are at their best in this Whitbread Prize winner.

Review:

"'A staggering achievement, brilliantly enjoyable' Nadine Gordimer"

"'A masterpiece' Sunday Times"

"'A novel of metamorphosis, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb' The Times"

"'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 great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling." (V S Pritchett)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0963270702
• ISBN 13: 9780963270702
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560