The Satanic Verses

No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians Gibreel Farishta ( for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies ) and Saladin Chamcha a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.