Shame

Salman Rushdie combines magic realism with a fierce rivalry to illustrate his central theme - that shame begets violence and violence begets shame. “[Rushdie’s] novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush... each paragraph luxurious and delicious”  (The New Yorker).

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

Shame is set in an imaginary country that strongly resembles Pakistan - a vast, sprawling canvas that illuminates its history, language and politics. The story involves the rivalry between two very different men - one a celebrated warrior, the other a debauched playboy - who are engaged in a protracted duel that is played out in the political landscape of their country.

“Shame is and is not about Pakistan, that invented, an 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 UK

Salman Rushdie has been nominated for the Booker Prize seven times, winning once in 1981, and was knighted for services to literature in 2007.  He is the author of 14 novels and has also written a collection of short stories and four works of non-fiction. He was shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize. and joined the Companions of Honour in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in her Platinum Jubilee year.