The Satanic Verses - by Salman Rushdie

About the Book

A hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate, plummet from the sky, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Book Synopsis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "[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

Winner of the Whitbread Prize

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

Praise for The Satanic Verses

"Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air."--The New York Times Book Review

"Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary . . . a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination."--The Guardian (London)

"A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb."--The Times (London)

Review Quotes

"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

About the 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), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into over forty languages.