No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously 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 powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.

Contents:

I The Angel Gibreel 1 2 3 4

II Mahound 1

III Ellowen Deeowen 1 2 3 4 5

IV Ayesha 

V A City Visible but Unseen 1 2

VI Return to Jahilia 

VII The Angel Azraeel 1  2  3

VIII The Parting of the Arabian Seas 

IX A Wonderful Lamp 

Acknowledgements

Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.

Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]  ... NextPage  >>