A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara Köz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbeg warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerised by her presence, and much trouble ensues.

The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery – the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other – the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia’s boyhood friend ‘il Machia’ – Niccolò Machiavelli – is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both.

But is Mogor’s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he’s a liar, must he die?

“It’s an elaborate, complicated read, intensely reflective of the author’s worldliness, intelligence, and partiality to the fantastical. . . . Entertainment of the highest literary order.” —Booklist

“This brilliant, fascinating, generous novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses . . . Rushdie leaves ranting to the fanatics who fear him. . . . [and] mak[es] us realists inhabit, for the span of our reading, the realm of Imagination, which is controlled by but not limited to observation of fact. . . . It is a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments. East meets west with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks.” —Ursula K Le Guin, The Guardian

“What Rushdie achieves so marvellously is to ensure that the evocation of the ephemeral retains the force of the tangible; this is the ‘magical task of metamorphosis’ that he believes to be central to the act of writing. . . . The Enchantress of Florence is, in the best sense of the word, childish fiction for adults: a welcome splash of bright colour; Rushdie, a virtuoso in poster-paint.” —National Post

“Rapturously poetic . . .” —Kirkus Reviews

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels, one collection of short stories, four works of non-fiction, and is the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In 1993 Midnight’s Children was judged to be the Booker of Bookers, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. The Moor’s Last Sigh won the Whitbread Prize in 1995 and the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commander des Arts et des Lettres. He was knighted in June 2007.