In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Rushdie has an amazing English style . . . witty enough to make you think twice. This book is a hilariously funny account of growing up, which does feature Mumbai as a main character . . . and a complex plot behind how everyone got to Mumbai, a kind of comic epic. . . So, you laugh and laugh, and then you get to the end and it is painful and there is this kind of bitter aftertaste . . . In other words, the moral content of the narrative is presented in a way which makes you laugh and then makes you start to wonder how you missed the undertones . . . how does the wit and verve of the story-telling make us blind to some rather less pleasant things? Is this an example of how we can construct our own personal life-narratives to delude ourselves? . . . and other such serious philosophical questions . . . How does the “exoticism” of the tale take us outside of ourselves so that we can turn around and see what we have been blind to in ourselves? I am, at the moment, very intrigued by the construction of moral/practical arguments . . . and this book gives much sensuous pleasure in the process . . .

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie CH FRSL (born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be “the best novel of all winners” on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at an event in Chautauqua, New York.

In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April 2023.