The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie 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. Moraes Moor Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Fierce, phantasmagorical.a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.--New York Times

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth, named to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Sir Salman Rushdie is one of the foremost novelists of our time. Winner of the Booker Prize, the Best of the Bookers, and the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie ranks with the best writers of a generation.
The author of sixteen previous books, Rushdie is best known for his second novel, Midnight's Children, which launched him into fame, and The Satanic Verses, which touched off a storm of protest across the Muslim world and resulted in a fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. These two novels together helped shape two themes that have come together to give form to his career. On one hand, he nearly single-handedly defined the shape that Indian novels written in English would take for decades. And on the other he became a symbol of enlightenment and free speech, defiant against the forces of intolerance and fundamentalist religion.
His books often tread a path that navigates these directions in his career. Fascinated both by the form of magic realism and the subject matter of post-colonialism, and by the experiences of various diasporas, Rushdie's works have an uncanny ability to tease the story out of people's sacred truths.
An international celebrity, Rushdie is often in the public eye, whether the focus is on his personal life or his political views. He is also Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emory University, and Midnight's Children has been adapted for a film version, to be shot by Canadian director Deepa Mehta.