LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019
In a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with the TV star Salman R. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where ‘Anything-Can-Happen’. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.
Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time,
Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral
and spiritual collapse, with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark
of his work. The fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a
profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age
in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.
Author Biography
Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels – Grimus,
Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and 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, The
Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years, Eight Months, and
Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House – and one collection of short
stories- East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction – Joseph
Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line – and
co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He
is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished
Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American
Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.