The Moor’s Last Sigh (English, Hardcover, Salman Rushdie)

‘Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed — me, Moraes Zogoiby, called ‘Moor’, for most of my life the only heir to the spice-trade-‘n’-big-business millions of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin — and of my banishment by my mother Aurora, née da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists.’

It began with the watery disappearance of Great-Grandfather Francisco, swallowed by the bustling lagoon lapping his island mansion; and with the catastrophic family conflict that followed, an epic battle that led to torched cashew orchards, smoldering cardamom groves, and murders. Thus was a family divided, not just by greed and secrets, but by chalk lines drawn across floors, like frontiers, and spice-sacks piled up across courtyards, as though they were defences.

(Years later, Bombay would also go up in flames, victim of its own fatal divisions.)

Once a year, high above massed festival crowds, her white hair flying in long loose exclamations, her ankles a-jingle with silver bell-bracelets, Aurora would dance her rebellion against India’s immense perversity. And, in magical charcoal and oils, she tried to heal what-could-not-be-kept-whole, laying bare, on gallery walls, the secrets of her family and times.

From the Paradise of Aurora’s legendary salon to his omnipotent father’s sky-garden atop a towering glass high-rise built by invisible men, the Moor’s breathless story unfolds his family’s often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes, and the tragicomic transformations wrought by love.

Surpassing even the imaginative brilliance of Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh is spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and compassionate. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.

—From the first-edition dust jacket.

L17,L45