Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder (Time) from internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE * Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming . . . a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium-a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language. -Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND NPR 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 a TV star. 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 satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie's work, the fully realized 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. Praise for Quichotte Brilliant . . . a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement. -Financial Times Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism. . . . The narration is fleet of foot, always one step ahead of the reader-somewhere between a pinball machine and a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders. . . . This novel can fly, it can float, it's anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot. -The Sunday Times Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes's story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump's America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys. . . . This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind. -The Times (UK)

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Reviews

Praise for Salman Rushdie A glittering novelist--one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. --The New Yorker [A] writer of courage, impressive strength . . . and sheer stylistic brilliance. --The Washington Post Book World Swift in Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire in Candide, Sterne in Tristram Shandy . . . [Rushdie] is very much a latter-day member of their company. --The New York Times Book Review One of the major literary voices of our time. --San Francisco Chronicle Rushdie's synthesizing energy, the way he brings together ancient myth and old story, contemporary incident and archetypal emotion, transfigures reason into a waking dream. --Los Angeles Times The most original imagination writing today. --Nadine Gordimer Rushdie is our Scheherazade. --Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian Everywhere he takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, our private lives and the history we make. --Time

A fantastical dream within a dream . . . a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder . . . As [Rushdie] weaves the journeys of the two men nearer and nearer, sweeping up a full accounting of all the tragicomic horrors of modern American life in the process, these energies begin to collapse beautifully inward, like a dying star. His readers realize that they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of the world. --Time [A] modern Don Quixote . . . Rushdie has created something that feels wholly original even if you've never heard of the hopelessly romantic Spanish knight-errant who sees danger in windmills. . . . Lucky for us, there are true storytellers and Rushdie is near the top of that list. If you haven't read him before, this is a good book to start with--it's fabulist and funny while revealing an awful lot about the world we live in today. --Associated Press Rushdie's Booker-longlisted fourteenth novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination. . . . You can't help being charmed by Rushdie's largesse. --The Guardian Hilarious by all accounts. --Literary Hub [Quichotte] is Don Quixote for our time, a smart satire of every aspect of the contemporary culture. Witty, profound, tender, this love story shows a fiction master at his brilliant best. --The Millions Rushdie's novel is many things beyond just a Don Quixote retelling. It's a satire on our contemporary fake-news, post-truth, Trumpian cultural moment, where the concept of reality itself is coming apart. It's a sci-fi novel, a spy novel, a road trip novel, a work of magical realism. It's a climate change parable, and an immigrant story in an era of anti-immigration feeling. It's a love story that turns into a family drama. . . . Characters, narratives and worlds collide and come apart in spectacular fashion, while Rushdie maintains an exhilarating control over it all. --The Independent Nothing but extraordinary . . . This incisively outlandish but lyrical meditation on intolerance, TV addiction, and the opioid crisis operates on multiple planes, with razor-sharp topicality and humor, delivering a reflective examination of the plight of marginalized personhood with veritable aplomb. Highly recommended. --Library Journal (starred review) Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope. . . . Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie. --Bookpage (starred review) A meditation on storytelling, memory, truth, and other hallmarks of a disappearing civilization . . . Humane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Allowing the wild adventure to overwhelm oneself is half the fun. Rushdie's extravagant fiction is the lie that tells the truth. . . . A brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) An exuberantly imagined and lacerating homage . . . Rushdie meshes shrewd, parodic humor with intensifying suspense and pervasive sympathy, seeding this picaresque doomsday adventure with literary and television allusions and philosophical musings. . . . Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials. --Booklist (starred review)

Author Information

Salman Rushdie is the author of thirteen previous novels--Luka and the Fire of Life, Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House--and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction--Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line--and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

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