Audiobooks by Salman Rushdie

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Brought to you by Penguin. From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring - and surviving - an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art - and finding the strength to stand up again. ©2024 Salman Rushdie (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Salman Rushdie (Author), Salman Rushdie, TBD (Narrator)

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Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

Brought to you by Penguin. From 'Best of the Booker' winner Salman Rushdie, an incisive and inspiring collection of non-fiction essays, criticism and speeches that takes readers on a thrilling journey through the evolution of language and culture Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, including several never previously in print, Languages of Truth chronicles a period of momentous cultural shifts. Across a wide variety of subjects, Rushdie delves into the nature of storytelling as a deeply human need, and what emerges is a love letter to literature itself. Throughout, Rushdie shares his personal encounters, on the page and in person, with storytellers from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison, and revels in the creative lines that can join art and life. Always attuned to the malleability of language, Rushdie considers the nature of truth, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism and censorship. Written with the author's signature wit and energy, Languages of Truth offers pleasure and insight in equal measure, confirming Rushdie's place as one of the most original and important thinkers of our time. © Salman Rushdie 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Salman Rushdie (Author), Raj Ghatak, Salman Rushdie (Narrator)

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Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Brought to you by Penguin. Haroun's father is the greatest of all storytellers. His magical stories bring laughter to the sad city of Alifbay. But one day something goes wrong and his father runs out of stories to tell. Haroun is determined to return the storyteller's gift to his father. So he flies off on the back of the Hoopie bird to the Sea of Stories - and a fantastic adventure begins.

Salman Rushdie (Author), Homer Todiwala (Narrator)

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Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Brought to you by Penguin. Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's 'Inside the Whale', providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. Profound, passionate and insightful, Imaginary Homelands is a masterful collection from one of the greatest writers working today. © Salman Rushdie 1991 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), Justin Avoth (Narrator)

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The Jaguar Smile

Brought to you by Penguin. An extraordinary and vivid introduction to the country of Nicaragua and its politics from the Booker-winning author of Midnight's Children. In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous range of people, from the foreign minister, a priest, to the midwife who kept a pet cow in her living room. His perceptions always heightened by his sensitivity and his unique flair for language, in The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie brings us the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple, everything is contested, and life-or-death struggles are an everyday occurrence. 'Stirring and original' New York Times 'A masterpiece of sympathetic yet critical reporting' Edward Said © Salman Rushdie 1987 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), John Hopkins (Narrator)

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East, West

Brought to you by Penguin. This dazzling collection of short stories explores the allure and confusion of what happens when East meets West. Fantasy and realism collide as a rickshaw driver writes letters home describing his film star career in Bombay; a mispronunciation leads to romance and an unusual courtship in sixties London; two childhood friends turned diplomats live out fantasies hatched by Star Trek; and Christopher Columbus dreams of consummating his relationship with Queen Isabella. With one foot in the East and one foot in the West, this collection reveals the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between the two. © Salman Rushdie 1994 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), Sagar Arya (Narrator)

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The Moor's Last Sigh

Brought to you by Penguin. **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby is the last in line of a crooked and fantastical dynasty of spice merchants and crime lords from Cochin. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As we travel with him on a route that takes him from India to Spain, he spins his labyrinthine family tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. But does the India of his parents - populated by extravagant artists, piratical gatekeepers and mysterious lost paintings - still exist? And will he ever discover what became of his fiery and tempestuous mother? Moraes' epic quest to uncover the truth of the past is a love story to a vanishing world, and also its last hurrah. 'Salman Rushdie's greatest novel' Sunday Times © Salman Rushdie 1995 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), Taheen Modak (Narrator)

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Shame

Brought to you by Penguin. The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers' fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men - one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure - living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal. 'Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives' The Times © Salman Rushdie 1983 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), Homer Todiwala (Narrator)

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The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Brought to you by Penguin. On Valentine's Day, 1989, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, disappears in a devastating earthquake. Her lover, the singer Ormus Cama, cannot accept that he has lost her, and so begins his eternal quest to find her and bring her back. His journey takes him across the globe and through cities pulsating with the power of rock 'n' roll, to Bombay, London and New York. 'The first great rock 'n' roll novel in the English language' The Times © Salman Rushdie 1999 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), Mikhail Sen (Narrator)

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Grimus

Brought to you by Penguin. The extraordinary literary debut of Salman Rushdie Flapping Eagle is a young Axona Indian gifted with immortal life after drinking an elixir from his wayward sister. But after 777 years of sailing the world's seas, he becomes weary of life, and sets out to find the mystical Calf Island, a place where his fellow immortals have gathered and created their own version of the human race. But Calf Island is a strange place - like its inhabitants, it is both blessed and cursed. Sensing a terrible darkness at the heart of the island, Flapping Eagle sets out to scale the island's peak and confront its mysterious and potent creator, Grimus himself. 'A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present day... Grimus is a parallel form of life, and conjuring of an alternative society' Financial Times © Salman Rushdie 1975 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Salman Rushdie (Author), Adam Sims (Narrator)

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Quichotte

** LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 ** Brought to you by Penguin. In a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age. Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with the TV star Salman R. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where 'Anything-Can-Happen'. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse, with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work. The fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Salman Rushdie (Author), Vikas Adam (Narrator)

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Grimus

After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing-and ultimately the burden-of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island's peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face-to-face with the island's creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. Salman Rushdie's celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago.

Salman Rushdie (Author), Tim Gerard Reynolds (Narrator)

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