From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.
In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.
Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.
Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.
Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.
Praise for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
“Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . 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.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
“One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”—USA Today
“A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] 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.”—The Washington Post
“Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his...
From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.
In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.
Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.
Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.
Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.
Praise for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
“Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . 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.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
“One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”—USA Today
“A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] 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.”—The Washington Post
“Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his...
Reviews-
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Starred review from May 18, 2015
In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrativeâone that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books. The title is a reference to the magical stretch of time that unites the book's three periods, which are actually millennia apart. In the first period (the 12th century), jinn princess Dunia falls in love with real-life philosopher and advocate of reason and science Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd) and bears multiple children. In the second period (current day), Dunia's descendants, a group including a gardener and a young graphic novelist, are unaware of their powerful lineage (despite the fact that they inherited Dunia's trademark earlobelessness). Then they witness a great storm devastating New York; worse, a slit between the jinn world and the human world opens and the dark jinn slip through. The gardener suddenly finds himself levitating, the artist hosting jinn in his room. Dunia returns to defend the human race by confronting her four fiercest enemies, one by one: Zumurrud, Zabardast, Shining Ruby, and Ra'im Blood-Drinker. Rushdie even incorporates a third period, a far-future millennium, further tying his story together across time. His magical realism celebrates the power of metaphor, while both historic accounts and fables are imbued with familiar themes of migration and separation, reason and faith, repression and freedom. 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. -
Starred review from July 1, 2015
"It's a terrible thing when one speaks metaphorically and the metaphor turns into a literal truth." So writes Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 2012, etc.) in one of his very best books, one whose governing metaphor can be about many terrible truths indeed.Do the math, and Rushdie's title turns into a different way of counting up to 1,001 nights. Small wonder that the first characters we encounter are an exceedingly wise philosopher named, thinly, Ibn Rushd, "the translator of Aristotle," and an exceedingly beguiling supernatural being in the form of a girl of about 16 who harbors numerous secrets, not just that she's Jewish in a place overrun with Islamic fundamentalists (and where it's thus best to live as "Jews who could not say they were Jews"), but that she is, in fact, one of the jiniri, "shadow-women made of fireless smoke." Got all that? In the span of, yes, 1,001 nights, Dunia gives birth to three broods of children who, being jinn, can do all sorts of cool things, such as fly about on magic carpets or slither hither and yon like snakes. Dunia is studiously irreligious, which is perhaps more dangerous than being Jewish, inclined to say of Ibn Rushd's explanations of all the wonderful things God can do, "That's stupid." Her endless children are inclined to favor the secular over the divine as well, a complicating factor when the dimensions turn all inside out and the jinn, now in our time, are called on to battle the forces of evil that have been hiding on the other side of the metaphorical wall between-well, civilizations, maybe. Rushdie turns in 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: "A fairy king," he writes, and he knows whereof he speaks, "can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words." Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his best.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from July 1, 2015
The jinn, Rushdie tells us, are creatures made of smokeless fire, shape-shifters infused with powers that defy our experience of gravity and time. They live in their own world, yet they can't resist meddling in our affairs. But the Lightning Princess is different. For all her fearsome mastery over the thunderbolt, she falls in love with a mortal in the twelfth century, a Spanish Arab philosopher whose books, the most famous of which is The Incoherence of the Incoherence, are banned and burned because he argues for rationalism instead of religious fundamentalism. This man of reason is Ibn Rushd, the very thinker Rushdie's father honored when he invented a new, more modern family. Now this historic figure serves as the guiding light for his namesake's latest 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, where the dream of righteous justice and transcendent liberty can flourish. His thirteenth work of fiction begins with the fateful liaison between the lovely jinn and the old philosopher, which, thanks to Dunia's supernatural fertility, produces the first generation of an undetected tribe of descendants who look and feel human but who lack earlobes and possess secret jinn powers. Rushdie leaps forward 1,000 years from now, when future chroniclers look back to our fraught, accelerating epoch to tell a tale of the time of strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight days, which is to say, one thousand nights and one night more. With this enchanting declaration, Rushdie adds a new link to the long narrative chain that connects us to that most marvelous and life-saving of storytellers, Scheherazade, who risked her life to put an end to a king's murderous rampage by telling him 1,001 beguiling tales. Brave and brilliant Scheherazade has inspired countless writers through the ages. Rushdie acknowledged his debt in earlier works, including The Moor's Last Sigh (1996), and homage is also found in Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (1995), Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow (2010), Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati (2008), Nelida Pinon's Voices of the Desert (2009), and John Barth's Chimera (1972) and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), which takes place directly after September 11, 2001. The long spell of strangenesses is precipitated by an apocalyptic storm that devastates New York City. In its aftermath, a hardworking gardener, an earlobe-less Indian from India known as Mr. Geronimo, finds that his feet no longer touched the ground. Meanwhile, in Queens, a wormhole opens between the worlds of the jinn and humans in the bedroom of Jimmy Kapoor, a young wannabe graphic novelist. Many more manifestations of the wondrous, weird, and inexplicable occur as a war of the worlds begins, stoked from beyond by none other than Ibn Rushd, still loved by Dunia, and his real-life archrival, the religious thinker Ghazali, who, in Rushdie's fabulist scenario, is aligned with the most terrifying jinn of them all. Philosophy, like religion, can be dangerous. 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. Rushdie scatters intriguing allusions (Beckett, Magritte, Gogol, Obama) about... -
August 1, 2015
What if today's violence and political instability could be blamed on jinnis? That is the premise of this latest novel from Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence). Here, the War of the Two Worlds is a proxy war between dark and light jinnis and also a war between religious fundamentalism and reason, with roots going back to 12th-century Spain and the dusty corpses of two philosophers, Ghazali and Ibn Rushd. Ghazali, having rescued a powerful jinn named Zumurrud Shah from a bottle, used one of his wishes to send Zumurrud to wreak havoc on Earth. In contrast, Rushd was a man of reason, as well as a lover of the jinnia Dunia and the forefather of the Duniazat, a tribe of human-jinni hybrids birthed by Dunia, who has a weakness for humanity. The hybrids are unaware of their jinn heritage, and with the dark jinn deploying events such as war, terrorism, and global climate change as weapons, it is up to Dunia to activate the jinn in her descendants so they can fight Zumurrud and his friends (imagine drunken jinni frat boys run amok on Earth). VERDICT Most readers will overlook Rushdie's not-so-subtle scolding in this rollicking magical realist adventure, which is fast paced and accessible. It can be enjoyed as a fairy-tale adventure, literary fiction, or a political allegory for our times. [See Prepub Alert, 3/23/15.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 15, 2015
Centuries ago, a princess of wild and wanton Fairyland fell in love with a mortal man who espoused rationality, and their descendants have set off a battle between light and dark, reason and hidebound conviction, that will last two years eight months and 28 nights--that is, 1001 nights. Thus does Booker Prize-winning Rushdie use magical fairy-tale style to challenge the notion that fairy-tale thinking should prevail.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- The New York Times Book Review "Courageous and liberating . . . a breathless mash-up of wormholes, mythical creatures, current affairs and disquisitions on philosophy and theology."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian "[Salman] Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. . . . 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 colors, its boisterousness, humor and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit."
- Los Angeles Times "This is Rushdie's first [novel] for adults since 2008, and he seems to be having fun with the adult content. He works in jokes about the sexual appetites of his jinn, brings alive dark corners of Manhattan, explores misplaced love, and creates a good-versus-evil battle that's firmly grounded in philosophy. . . . 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."
- Booklist (starred review) "[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."
- The Globe and Mail "A boisterous novel of ideas, a spirited manifesto for reason disguised as a tale of a jinn war lasting exactly two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, or 1,001 nights . . . What results is hallmark Rushdie: a composite of magic realism, mythology, science fiction and straight-up fantasy. . . . Like the best Rushdie novels, Two Years is playful and inventive, and also intellectually bracing."
- San Francisco Chronicle "Incandescent . . . brilliant, ambitious . . . 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."
- The Washington Post "In these nested, swirling tales, 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."
- Kirkus Reviews (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."
- USA Today "Splendid and heartfelt . . . There's an abundance of authorial winking here, the unabashed symbolism and double entendres quickly stacking up in a manner that wires Rushdie into an ancient storytelling tradition without preventing him from maintaining his own claim on originality and freshness. . . . Two Y
