Vorab-RezensentenSalman Rushdie

After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing–and ultimately the burden–of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island’s peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face-to-face with the island’s creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. Salman Rushdie’s celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago.

From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling. In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining. Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world. Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse. Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveler calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal Empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive and finally escapes to Renaissance Florence, where she proceeds to enchant the city. Yet this was 100 years ago--the math doesn't work--so the stranger cannot be believed. Can his tale unravel the mystery? The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders-- meticulously researched, and replete with incredible characters including Akbar the Great, one of the great emperors in world history, and Nicollo Machiavelli. It is a novel about East meeting West; about Florence at the dawn of the Renaissance, a great lost Empire, the meaning of political power, and its proper uses, the power of love to overcome time. It is also the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. Virtuosic, by turns hilarious and profoundly moving, irreverent, bawdy, relevant, multi-layered, complex and completely absorbing: The Enchantress of Florence is a masterpiece, both Rushdie at the height of his powers and a bold departure by one of the world's best known, highly praised, and most admired novelists.