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.

Reviews

“A baroque whirlwind of a narrative . . . [Rushdie helps] us escape from the present into a dreamlike past that ultimately makes us more aware of the dangers and illusions of our everyday lives.”—Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

“Brilliant . . . Rushdie’s sumptuous mixture of history and fable is magnificent.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (London)

“For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician’s wand. . . . One of his best [novels].”—John Sutherland, Financial Times

“A beguiling, incandescent tale of travel, treachery, and transformation set in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis and in India’s Mughal Empire . . . Rushdie ushers in a caravan of low, laughable characters in the service of his weighty and witty observations on religion, politics, sex, war, art, philosophy, and science in an East–West world of white mischief and black magic, of enigmatic nightmares and inscrutable dreams.”—Elle

“Beyond its magical razzle-dazzle lays a work of steely contemporary resonance, rich in slyly metafictional allusions.”—Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg News
 
“A mesmerizing tale . . . a feat of narrative wizardry: a playful, ruminative, vibrant meditation on subjects that never bore—power, sex, love, travel, doubt.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“As ever, Rushdie’s verbal profusions war with his love of straight-up storytelling. The reader wins.”—Time

“About the inner lives of royals, he proves as sharp as Helen Mirren in The Queen. . . . Rushdie’s brightest ideas have always concerned belonging, travel, and exile, and here he shapes them into a shimmering tale about the deep sweetness of home.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“The Enchantress of Florence is a luxuriant triumph. . . . This is Rushdie’s ongoing, illuminating conversation with readers about our world and our place in it. . . . The story ends, our thirst remains.”—New Statesman

“Salman Rushdie’s ebullient historical novel manifests both his dexterous erudition and his bawdy wit.”—The Atlantic

Renaissance Florence's artistic zenith and Mughal India's cultural summit--reached the following century, at Emperor Akbar's court in Sikri--are the twin beacons of Rushdie's ingenious latest, a dense but sparkling return to form. The connecting link between the two cities and epochs is the magically beautiful "hidden princess," Qara Kez, so gorgeous that her uncovered face makes battle-hardened warriors drop to their knees. Her story underlies the book's circuitous journey. A mysterious yellow-haired man in a multicolored coat steps off a rented bullock cart and walks into 16th-century Sikri: he speaks excellent Persian, has a stock of conjurer's tricks and claims to be Akbar's uncle. He carries with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth I, which he translates for Akbar with vast incorrectness. But it is the story of Akbar's great-aunt, Qara Kez, that the man (her putative son) has come to the court to tell. The tale dates to the time of Akbar's grandfather, Babar (Qara Kez's brother), and it involves her relationship with the Persian Shah. In the Shah's employ is Janissary general Nino Argalia, an Italian convert to Islam, whose own story takes the narrative to Renaissance Florence. Rushdie eventually presents an extended portrait of Florence through the eyes of Niccoli Machiavelli and Ago Vespucci, cousin of the more famous Amerigo. Rushdie's portrayal of Florence pales in comparison with his depiction of Mughal court society, but it brings Rushdie to his real fascination here: the multitudinous, capillary connections between East and West, a secret history of interchanges that's disguised by standard histories in which West "discovers" East. Along the novel's roundabout way, Qara Kez does seem more alive as a sexual obsession in the tales swapped by various men than as her own person. Genial Akbar, however, emerges as the most fascinating character in the book. Chuang Tzu tells of a man who dreams of being a butterfly and, on waking up, wonders whether he is now a butterfly dreaming he is a man. In Rushdie's version of the West and East, the two cultures take on a similar blended polarity in Akbar as he listens to the tales. Each culture becomes the dream of the other. (June) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

"A romance of beauty and power from Italy to India . . . so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder."
-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"This is 'history' jubilantly mixed with postmodernist magic realism."
-Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

"A baroque whirlwind of a narrative . . . [Rushdie helps] us escape from the present into a dreamlike past that ultimately makes us more aware of the dangers and illusions of our everyday lives."
-Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

"Brilliant . . . Rushdie's sumptuous mixture of history and fable is magnificent."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (London)

"For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician's wand. . . . One of his best [novels]."
-John Sutherland, Financial Times

"[A] prodigious fever dream of a book."
-Lisa Shea, Elle

"Beyond its magical razzle-dazzle lays a work of steely contemporary resonance, rich in slyly metafictional allusions."
-Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg News