Shame: A Novel [Paperback]

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic,The Satanic Verses,Shameis Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan.” In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men–one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure–Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation–“shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”Shameis an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ETRANGER

“Rushdie’s novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush...each paragraph luxurious and delicious.”The New Yorker

“There can seldom have been so robust and baroque an incarnation of the political novel asShame. It can be read as a fable, polemic, or excoriation; as history or as fiction.... This is the novel as myth and as satire.”Sunday Telegraph

“Shameis and is not about Pakistan, that invented, imaginary country, ‘a failure of the dreaming mind.’... Rushdie shows us with what fantasy our sort of history must now be written—if, that is, we are to penetrate it, and perhaps even save it.”The Guardian

“Swift inGulliver’s Travels, Voltaire inCandide, Sterne inTristram Shandy...Rushdie, it seems to me, is very much a latter-day member of their company.”The New York Times Book Review

“A pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives.”The Times(UK)

Sir SALMAN RUSHDIE is the multi-award winning author of eleven previous novels--Luka and the Fire of Life,Grimus,Midnight's Children(which won the Booker Prize, 1981, and the Best of the Booker Prize, 2008),Shame,The Satanic Verses,Haroun and the Sea of Stories,The Moor's Lasl³$