Description: A hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate, plummet from the sky, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.
Review Quotes: "A staggering achievement, brilliantly enjoyable."--Nadine Gordimer
"Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary . . . a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination."--The Guardian "A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb."--The Times (London) "The tone of the novel veers daringly from the slapstick to the melodramatic. . . . [Rushdie's] conjuring tricks are magical. . . . personal and touching."--The New York Times"A glittering novelist--one with startling imagination and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling."--The New Yorker
"This invites comparison with the miracle-laden narratives of Gabriel García Márquez. Highly recommend."--Library Journal "For Rushdie fans this is a splendid feast."--Publishers Weekly
"An entertainment in the highest sense of that much-exploited word . . . a surreal hallucinatory feast . . . [Rushdie's] inventiveness never flags."--Kirkus Reviews
"Damnably entertaining and fiendishly ingenious. One of the very few current writers whose works are attempts at the great Bible, the 'bright book of life.'"--London Review of Books
"A masterpiece."--Sunday Times
"The Satanic Verses has all the excellences that made [Midnight's Children] a publishing event: an epic sweep and feel for the larger currents of history reminiscent of Tolstoy, a comic genius for idiosyncratic characterization in polyphonic voices worthy of Dickens, together with the imaginative freedom of fabulation characteristic of Latin American fiction and its magical realism. The Satanic Verses [is] a wider ranging novel. Not since Gravity's Rainbow has any novel so successfully captured the cosmopolitan texture of modern life. . . . Finally, The Satanic Verses confronts the problem of religion and modern life in such a direct and profound way that it has been banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, and all the Arab countries. . . . If you want to find out why Rushdie is arguably the most talented and significant author writing in the English language today, by all means read this book."--The Virginia Quarterly Review