Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury and Shalimar the Clown. He has also published works of non-fiction including The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.
My Beloved Life (2024) Amitava Kumar "This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling. A father, a daughter, a crime, a country being born, a migration, another country, a plague. 'We are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness. Everything else is ordinary,' Kumar writes. His novel offers magnificent witness, and is not ordinary but extraordinary."
The Future Future (2023) Adam Thirlwell "Sex, revolution and death in eighteenth-century France and America, described in the language of the future, and featuring an astonishing visit to the moon. A dazzling performance, unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year."
The Unfolding (2022) A M Homes "A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect dialogue, that feels terrifying close to the unfunny truth."
The Deceptions (2022) Jill Bialosky "The great Greeks - Odysseus, Herakles, Aphrodite, and, centrally, Leda and the Swan - circle around this powerfully written account of a woman in a kind of slow crisis and help her interrogate her marriage and desires. Then, in an extraordinary, explosive final act, a profound act of betrayal lifts the novel towards genuine tragedy. The Deceptions is a deeply felt and formally original tour-de-force."
Our Country Friends (2021) Gary Shteyngart "You can retreat from global catastrophe, but your private calamities will come and find you. Gary Shteyngart’s most moving novel, Chekhov and Boccaccio reimagined in America in the year of the pandemic, is a powerful fable of our broken time."
(In the Country of Others, book 1) Leïla Slimani "The world of this novel-Morocco after World War II, leading up to the revolt against French colonialism-is beautifully created. Personal life, social life, everyday life spring vividly from the page, and we feel deeply for the family caught in the middle of the conflict of history. An exceptional, powerful novel from this justly celebrated writer."
The Book of Anna (2020) Carmen Boullosa "Anna Karenina’s children and other fictions of Tolstoy’s—who know they aren’t exactly human—intertwine with Carmen Boullosa’s own fictions, who think they are real, and also with the Russian Revolution. A delightfully original and enjoyable book—Russian literature seen through Latin American eyes, and made into something new."
Long-Haired Cat-boy Cub (2020) Etgar Keret "I think Keret is a brilliant writer, entirely different from any other I know. He is the voice of the next generation."
Tyll (2020) Daniel Kehlmann "This is a brilliant and unputdownable novel. Kehlmann is the true inheritor of the German fabulist tradition that stretches back to the Brothers Grimm and even further, and in the legendary prankster figure of Tyll Ulenspiegel he has found his perfect avatar."
The Falconer (2019) Dana Czapnik "A deeply affecting tale of a young woman coming of age in a man's world."
Original Prin (2018) Randy Boyagoda "Original Prin is many things at once: a richly funny campus novel, a painfully humorous portrait of a modern family, an examination of a whole spectrum of religious faith from shaky to fanatical, and finally, in a climax of pitch-black comedy, a thriller too. Boyagoda writes with real panache and drive. An unputdownable book."
The Secrets Between Us (2018) (Bhima, book 2) Thrity Umrigar "The women at the heart of this novel inhabit the harsh world of the urban Indian poor, and struggle separately and together for dignity and survival. Thrity Umrigar has written a moving human tale that vividly brings to life both the women and the city of Mumbai."
Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (2018) (Bob Honey, book 1) Sean Penn "It seems wrong to say that so dystopian a novel is great fun to read, but it’s true. I suspect that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson would love this book."
Home Fire (2017) Kamila Shamsie "Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength. She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world's many tragedies and histories shape one another."
The Wildings (2016) (Wildings, book 1) Nilanjana Roy "A delight to read. Eliot's Old Possum would have enjoyed these Practical Indian Cats."
Revenge (2010) Taslima Nasrin "Taslima Nasrin has spoken out about the oppression of women under Islam, and what she's said needed saying."
The Pleasure Seekers (2010) Tishani Doshi "This is a captivating, delightful novel. I was totally engaged by Tishani Doshi's people and by their world, and the language often rises... to powerful metaphorical heights."
Pop (2001) Kitty Aldridge "Kitty Aldridge is a real discovery, a writer of precision, delicacy and wit, and her first novel is a rare delight."
White Teeth (1999) Zadie Smith "Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is about how we all got here - from the Caribbean, from the Indian sub-continent, from the thirteenth place in a long-ago Olympic bicycle race - and about what here turned out to be. It's an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has ... bite."
Secrets (1998) (Blood in the Sun, book 3) Nuruddin Farah "One of the finest contemporary African novelists."
