Synopses & Reviews
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, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence.
The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man's world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power.
Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world's most important living writers.
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"Entertainment of the highest literary order." Booklist (starred review)
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"For Rushdie, the pen is a magician's wand... If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it." John Sutherland, Financial Times (London)
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"This brilliant, fascinating, generous novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses...[a] sumptuous, impetuous mixture of history with fable. But in the end, of course, it is the hand of the master artist, past all explanation, that gives this book its glamour and power, its humour and shock, its verve, its glory. It is a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments." Ursula K Le Guin, The Guardian (London)
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"[A] prodigious fever dream of a book... A beguiling, incandescent tale of travel, treachery, and transformation set in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis and in India's Mughal Empire." Elle
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"The Enchantress of Florence reminds us, in case we may have forgotten, that [Rushdie] can tell a story across East and West better than anyone else in the language." John Brotton, The Telegraph (London)
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"Readers who succumb to the spell of Rushdie's convoluted, cross-continental fable may find it enchanting....Rapturously poetic in places, very funny in others, yet the novel ultimately challenges both patience and comprehension." Kirkus Reviews
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"Rushdie has given us a fable, a fairy tale for adults if you will, wrapped in history. It can be read for the pure enjoyment of the story, and as literature of the highest order. I was totally enchanted by one of the most talented and important contemporary authors." Charlotte Observer
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"In a world in which many readers seem to crave fact after fact after fact...the novelist, the last alchemist, miraculously turns fact into something greater, and as if transforming clay bricks into gold, gives facts life." The Chicago Tribune
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"Salman Rushdie is so much identified with seriousness his choice of subjects, from Kashmir to Andalusia; his position as a literary negotiator of East and West; his decade and more of internal exile in hiding from the edict of a fanatical theocrat that it can be easy to forget how humorous he is. In much the same way, his extraordinary knowledge of classical literature sometimes causes people to overlook his command of the vernacular."
Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly (
read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight's Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the "Booker of Bookers," the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor's Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction: Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.