Shalimar the Clown: A Novel

Los Angeles, 1991. Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is murdered in broad daylight on his illegitimate daughter India's doorstep, slaughtered by a knife wielded by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown. The dead man is a charismatic World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability, a former US ambassador to India and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination, but turns out to be passionately personal.

This is the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and his daughter — and of a fourth character, the woman who links them, whose story finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, from Nazi-occupied Europe to the world of modern terrorism. Along the way there is kindness, and magic capable of producing miracles; there is also war — ugly, unavoidable and seemingly interminable. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous.

Everything is unsettled. Everything is connected. Lives are uprooted, names keep changing — nothing is permanent. The story of anywhere is also the story of everywhere else. Spanning the globe and darting through history, Rushdie's narrative captures the heart of the reader and the spirit of a troubled age.

National Post

"Read Shalimar the Clown for the effervescent fun factor that is always present in Rushdie's work. . . and for its devastating portrait of the destruction of Kashmir."

The Globe and Mail

"[Shalimar the Clown] is that rare highwire act, a literary thriller. It seems a vigorous rebutal to the recent dismissal of fiction by V. S. Naipaul, to the effect that 'if you write a novel... it's of no account.'"

Financial Times (UK)

“A masterly deployment of interconnected narratives spanning six decades. . . . Dazzling. . . . A magical-realist masterpiece that equals, and arguably surpasses, the achievements of Midnights Children, Shame and The Moors Last Sigh. The Swedes wont dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.”

Kirkus Reviews

“The. . .transformation of Shalimar into a terrorist is easily the most impressive achievement of the book, and here one must congratulate Rushdie for having made artistic capital out of his own suffering, for the years spent under police protection, hunted by zealots, have been poured into the novel in ways which ring hideously true. . . . Shalimar the Clown is a powerful parable about the willing and unwilling subversion of multiculturalism.”

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Salman Rushdie:

"Our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist, a writer of breathtaking originality. . . . He has become, as much for his convictions as for his creativity, the finest English writer of India."

Financial Times (UK)

"With Rushdie one is always in the presence of a true original. . . . More than any other contemporary English writer, Rushdie makes the page sing with his prose."

The Washington Post Book World

"A master storyteller.

The Standard (UK)

"A great novelist, a master of perpetual storytelling."

V. S. Pritchett

Praise for Fury:

"An exhilarating read. . . . One page of Fury is worth a thousand pages of the grey, risk-averse prose that passes so often for contemporary literary fiction."

The Globe and Mail

"A beautifully written and carefully constructed novel. . . . [Fury] ricochets back and forth between well mannered realism and [Rushdies] own brand of what might almost be called surrealism manic, absurdist, biting, over-the-top and very funny."

The Vancouver Sun

From the Hardcover edition.