The Moor's Last Sigh

In his first novel since The Satanic Verses, Rushdie gives readers a masterpiece of controlled storytelling, informed by astonishing scope and ambition, by turns compassionate, wicked, poignant, and funny. From the paradise of Aurora's legendary salon to his omnipotent father's sky-garden atop a towering glass high-rise, the Moor's story evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes in a world of possibilities embodied by India in this century.

In his first novel since The Satanic Verses, Rushdie gives readers a masterpiece of controlled storytelling, informed by astonishing scope and ambition, by turns compassionate, wicked, poignant, and funny. From the paradise of Aurora's legendary salon to his omnipotent father's sky-garden atop a towering glass high-rise, the Moor's story evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes in a world of possibilities embodied by India in this century.

Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year

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

Susan Shapiro

"I was raised neither a Catholic nor a Jew. I was both and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was -- what's the word these days? atomized. Yessir: a real Bombay mix." So says Moraes Zogioby, known as Moor, the narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh. Salman Rushdie's first novel in seven years is his best work since 1980's brilliant Midnight's Children. Moor, who has a disorder that causes him to age at twice the normal speed, is the last surviving member of a crazy clan of wealthy South Indian spice merchants. He tells their insane, incestuous, violent domestic saga, which spans four generations. It centers on his beautiful mother, Aurora da Gama, a stubborn, passionate, Christian artist who, at 15, falls in love with the handsome Abraham Zogioby, a penniless, 35-year-old Jewish employee of her family. They marry and have four children: Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor. Betrayal, murder, and mayhem ensue.

Rushdie, the author of nine previous books -- including The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue his death sentence in 1989 -- alludes often to his own exile, the story of modern India and the dangers of art. At first the hyperbole, didactic asides, verbal puns, lyrical and lewd jokes, and slapstick routines seem a bit much, but if you stick with it, a cumulative magic takes hold. Rushdie's satiric, hysterically funny, political family tragedy is a masterpiece. -- Salon

One of the most celebrated writers of our time, SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of ten previous novels— Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and, in 2008, the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published four works of non-fiction, a collection of short stories, and edited two fiction anthologies. In June 2007, Rushdie was appointed a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. He holds the rank Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France and began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007. In May 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and also in 2008, the London Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". For two years he served as president of The PEN American Center, the world's oldest human rights organization, and is the chair of PEN's World Voices Festival of International Literature, an annual literary festival he began in New York in 2001. Rushdie is currently working on the film version of Midnight's Children.