Shortlisted for the Booker PrizeWinner of the Prix du Meilleur Livre EtrangerThe existing Vintage edition has sold over 50,000 copies
Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including
Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker),
The Satanic Verses, and
Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.
It is an astute, gleeful, political tale in which Rushdie dazzles with his prodigious gift for satire.Salman Rushdie has earned the right to be called one of our great story tellersThere can seldom have been so robust and baroque an incarnation of the political novel as
Shame. It can be read as a fable, polemic or excoriation; as history or as fiction... This is the novel as myth and as satire
Shame is every bit as good as
Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperativesSalman Rushdie is a magnificent writer. He has a free-ranging imagination and a coarse, strong wit. He attackes language with energy and without constraint
The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's unforgettable 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
