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Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, a new novel by Salman Rushdie, is a wonder tale about the way we live now, a rich and multifaceted work that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story to bring alive a world – our world – that has been plunged into an age of unreason. Inspired by 2,000 years of storytelling tradition yet rooted in the concerns of our present moment, it is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of the imagination.
Jonathan Cape publishing director Dan Franklin said: “Salman’s new novel is one of his very best. It is fast-paced, funny, and an absolutely thrilling read, and so, so pertinent to the world in which we live.”
Louise Dennys, Executive Publisher of Random House of Canada, said of the new novel: “A truly great, deeply rewarding story is hard to come by and we cherish such stories. Salman Rushdie is our preeminent storyteller, but he has outdone even himself in his spellbinding new novel –his most entertaining, most moving and, given the novel’s powerful moral vision, his most deceptively lighthearted… It is absolutely gripping. The characters we meet here, with their dreams of love, their hopes and ambitions for themselves and the world, their battles for survival and for power, will live in our imaginations for years. The novel is sometimes such fun you will laugh aloud, but you will also be moved to tears. I loved every moment of this fabulous story.”
Praise
“In these nested, swirling tales, [Salman] Rushdie conjures up a whole universe of jinn slithering across time and space, meddling in human affairs and copulating like they’ve just been released from twenty years in a lamp. . . . Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“This book is a fantasy, a fairytale – and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world… I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness, humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
“E.M. Forster wrote that “the final test of a novel will be our affection for it.” And although the degree of one’s affection might swing widely between Harper Lee and Dante, surely “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” will be welcomed with a pure and generous affection by many… This is not simply because this novel is great fun, nor because of the uplift of its good-guys-win climax, but mostly because of the splendid and heartfelt optimism at the end of the story. There the narrator salutes the world we humans eventually create, 1,001 years from now, when fear has been overcome, God has been set aside, and violence is a thing of the past.” —Bob Shacochis, The Boston Globe
“Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is replete with fantastical creatures, scary monsters, very bad men (or rather, male jinns/genies) and one heroic woman. . . . While Rushdie has written hyped up sagas of worlds colliding before, and always espouses reason over fanaticism, there is something so loopy, so unleashed, about this tale as to make it particularly thrilling.” —Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
“’Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights’ is erudite without flaunting it, an amusement park of a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of control by being grounded by religion, history, culture and love.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“Before the arrival of his latest novel, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” Rushdie’s stature as one of the major literary voices of our time was already secure. And yet, in reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that all those years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.” —Carolina De Robertis, San Francisco Chronicle
“In “Midnight’s Children,” the novel that made him famous before “The Satanic Verses” made him infamous, Salman Rushdie fixed upon an apt metaphor for his way of writing. The novel’s narrator and author’s alter ego, at 9, becomes a “radio,” picking up the thoughts and voices of all the world around him; later, an old man, he becomes a transmitter, the storyteller broadcasting all those voices he has channeled throughout his life. [In] Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Rushdie is channeling them still — and a remarkable instrument he has proven to be, reproducing from his profound repository of history and culture and politics a polyphonic voice unlike anyone else’s, although it contains multitudes.” —Ellen Akins, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[A] rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable, perhaps his most thoroughly enjoyable to date. At once a scholar, rigorous observer, and lavishly imaginative novelist, Rushdie channels his well-informed despair over the brutality and absurdity of human life into works of fantasy. . . . Rushdie is having wickedly wise fun here. Every character has a keenly hilarious backstory, and the action (flying carpets and urns, gigantic attacking serpents, lightning strikes, to-the-death combat, sex) surges from drastic and pulse-raising to exuberantly madcap, magical, and genuinely emotional. . . . [A] fantastically inventive, spirited, astute, and delectable update of One Thousand and One Nights.” —Booklist (starred review)
“One of his very best books, one whose governing metaphor can be about many terrible truths indeed . . . a sometimes archly elegant, sometimes slightly goofy fairy tale—with a character named Bento V. Elfenbein, how could it be entirely serious?—for grown-ups . . . Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his best.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In his latest novel, Rushdie invents his own cultural narrative—one that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books. . . . Referencing Henry James, Mel Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo TV, and Aristotle, among others, Rushdie provides readers with an intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic pop-culture apocalyptic caprice.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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