FROM THE NEW INTRODUCTION BY Anita Desai:
"Rushdie's writing resembles a horse at full gallop that will not halt and wait. He creates an epic by turning his characters into symbols and archetypes so that their histories are lived out at several levels at one time-real and fantastic, metaphorical and symbolic . . . He is a writer of an epic-secular, irreligious, irreverent, subversive, both comic and profoundly serious . . . in short, an epic of our times."
"Huge, vital, engrossing . . . in all senses a fantastic book."
-THE SUNDAY TIMES LONDON
"In Salman Rushdie . . . India has produced a glittering novelist-one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like Garcia Marquez . . . he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths-and new ones that it goes on generating-into a kind of magic carpet . . . Saleem Sinai . . . is dramatizing his past life as a prophecy, even universalizing his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd's collective political history . . . As a tour de force his fantasy is irresistible."
-V.S. Pritchett, THE NEW YORKER
"One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation."
-THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS