Salman Rushdie has 19 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 20 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 157 ratings. The most-rated is The Satanic Verses.
The Satanic Verses
Summary
Inextricably linked with the fatwa called against its author in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Satanic Verses is, beyond that, a rich showcase for Salman Rushdie’s comic sensibilities, cultural observations, and unparalleled mastery of language. The tale of an Indian film star and a Bombay expatriate, Rushdie’s masterpiece was deservedly honored with the Whitbread Prize. The story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.
©1988 Salman Rushdie (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Quichotte
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER An epic Don Quixote for the modern age, “a brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder” (Time) from internationally best-selling author Salman Rushdie SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE “Lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming...a remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium - a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language.” (Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review) Named One of The Best Books of The Year by Time and NPR Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the listener on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie's work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction. Praise for Quichotte “Brilliant...a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.” (Financial Times) “Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism.... The narration is fleet of foot, always one step ahead of the reader - somewhere between a pinball machine and a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders.... This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot.” (The Sunday Times) “Quichotte [is] an updating of Cervantes’ story that proves to be an equally complicated literary encounter, jumbling together a chivalric quest, a satire on Trump’s America and a whole lot of postmodern playfulness in a novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys.... This is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.” (The Times, UK)
©2019 Salman Rushdie (P)2019 Random House Audio
Midnight's Children
Summary
Man Booker Prize Winner, 1981 Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.
©1981 Salman Rushdie (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Summary
Discover Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie's classic fantasy novel. Set in an exotic eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdie's classic children's novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as The Lord of the Rings, The Alchemist, and The Wizard of Oz. In this captivating work of fantasy from the author of Midnight's Children and The Enchantress of Florence, Haroun sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.
©1990 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Recorded Books
Salman Rushdie at the 92nd Street Y
Summary
Mr. Rushdie, the author of Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, reads from his newest novel, Shalimar the Clown. This event took place on November 3, 2005.
©2005 92 nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association (P)2005 92 nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association
Midnight's Children
Summary
Nikesh Patel stars as Saleem in BBC Radio 4's epic dramatisation of Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning novel of love, history and magic. Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of midnight on 14th-15th August 1947, at the exact moment that India and Pakistan become separate, independent nations. From that moment on, his fate is mysteriously handcuffed to the history of his country. But Saleem's story starts almost thirty years earlier, when his grandfather, Dr Aadam Aziz, falls in love with a woman concealed behind a perforated sheet. That pivotal moment in Kashmir in 1919 sparks a series of bizarre events that will lead to a cryptic prophecy and the birth of a boy with an extraordinary destiny. As a 'Midnight's Child', Saleem has magical powers, and can telepathically tune in to all the other gifted children whose birth coincided with India's division. However, his strange entanglement with the fate of India will have dramatic repercussions for both him and his country.... Adapted by Ayeesha Menon, this dazzling dramatisation of Rushdie's many-layered, magical realist masterpiece is both an enthralling family saga and a riveting history of post-colonialism. First broadcast to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India, it features Nikesh Patel as Saleem, with a star cast including Abhin Galeya, Meera Syal, Anneika Rose and Narinder Samra. Also included is an interview with Salman Rushdie, in which the author talks to radio drama director Emma Harding about his multi-award winning novel. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, and was subsequently awarded the 'Booker of Bookers' prize in 1993 and 'The Best of the Booker' prize in 2008.
©2017 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 BBC Worldwide Ltd
The Golden House
Summary
A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture - a hurtling mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities. On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of "the Gardens", a cloistered community in New York's Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the residents are immediately intrigued by the eccentric newcomer and his family. Along with his improbable name, untraceable accent, and unmistakable whiff of danger, Nero Golden has brought along his three adult sons: agoraphobic, alcoholic Petya, a brilliant recluse with a tortured mind; Apu, the flamboyant artist, sexually and spiritually omnivorous, famous on 20 blocks; and D, at 22 the baby of the family, harboring an explosive secret even from himself. There is no mother, no wife, at least not until Vasilisa, a sleek Russian expat, snags the septuagenarian Nero, becoming the queen to his king - a queen in want of an heir. Our guide to the Goldens' world is their neighbor René, an ambitious young filmmaker. Researching a movie about the Goldens, he ingratiates himself into their household. Seduced by their mystique, he is inevitably implicated in their quarrels, their infidelities, and, indeed, their crimes. Meanwhile, like a bad joke, a certain comic-book villain embarks upon a crass presidential run that turns New York upside-down. Set against the strange and exuberant backdrop of current American culture and politics, The Golden House also marks Salman Rushdie's triumphant and exciting return to realism. The result is a modern epic of love and terrorism, loss and reinvention - a powerful, timely story told with the daring and panache that make Salman Rushdie a force of light in our dark new age.
©2017 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Random House Audio
Shame
Summary
The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is "not quite Pakistan". In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men - one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure - Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation - "shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence." Shame is an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.
©1983 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Summary
Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again find her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus' childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, the photographer Rai. Around these 3 the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break: cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, and a brilliant remaking of the Orpheus myth. Rushdie is also the author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses.
©1999 Salman Rushdie (P)1999 NewStar Media Inc.
Joseph Anton
Summary
On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran". So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov - Joseph Anton. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day. This audiobook includes a prologue read by the author.
©2012 Salmon Rushdie (P)2012 Random House Audio
The Jaguar Smile
Summary
"I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice." So notes Salman Rushdie in his first work of nonfiction, a book as imaginative and meaningful as his acclaimed novels. In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of "a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision". Recounting his travels there in 1986, in the midst of America's behind-the-scenes war against the Sandinistas, Rushdie reveals a nation resounding to the clashes between government and individuals, history and morality.
©1997 Salman Rushdie (P)2016 Recorded Books
The Moor's Last Sigh
Summary
Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.
©1995 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Recorded Books
Fury
Summary
The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants. Aged 55, he is at once filled with melancholy and surging rage, so much so that he fears for the safety of his wife and young son. Escaping to New York City and its crowded streets, Malik seeks to extinguish himself and forget the life he left behind in London. It is here, in this void of virtual anonymity, that he falls in love again. In battle for possession of his very soul, Malik exemplifies the human need for connection. This unabridged recording features author Salman Rushdie's own intensely powerful narration.
©2001 Salman Rushdie (P)2001 Recorded Books, LLC
Grimus
Summary
After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next 700 years sailing the seas with the blessing - and ultimately the burden - of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island's peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face-to-face with the island's creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. Salman Rushdie's celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than 30 years ago.
©1975 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Recorded Books
Shalimar the Clown
Summary
From Salman Rushdie, New York Times best-selling author, Booker Prize-winner, and one of the great voices in contemporary literature, comes a majestic novel that solidifies the author's right to a Nobel Prize, which Kirkus Reviews says "he deserves more than any other living writer". When Maximilian Ophuls is murdered outside his daughter's home by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, it appears to be a political killing. Ophuls is the former U.S. ambassador to India and America's leading figure in counter-terrorism. But there is much more to Ophuls and his assassin, a mysterious man calling himself "Shalimar the Clown", than meets the eye. One woman is at the center of their shared history, a history of betrayal and deception that moves from World War II Europe to the troubled Kashmir region to contemporary America. Rushdie effortlessly weaves a series of interconnected narratives to form a sweeping and ambitious tale, at once timeless and startlingly modern, that reaches back through the years and across the continents.
©2005 Salman Rushdie (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC
Imaginary Homelands
Summary
Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The 70 essays collected here, written over the last 10 years, cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party; religious fundamentalism in America; racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.
©1991 Salman Rushdie (P)2017 Recorded Books
Thalia Book Club: Salman Rushdie Two Years and Twenty-Eight Nights
Summary
The author of Midnight's Children discusses Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights with A. M. Homes. Rushdie's novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today's world and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.
©2015 Symphony Space (P)2015 Symphony Space
Luka and the Fire of Life
Summary
Honored with almost every conceivable award for literary merit, Salman Rushdie penned this richly imagined fable for his son—and for book lovers the world over. From Rashid’s fertile intellect spring bedazzling tales his son Luka devours with a child’s earnestness. But when Rashid succumbs to an unending sleep, Luka must enter a magical world ruled by video-game logic.
©2010 Salman Rushdie (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
East, West
Summary
A rickshaw driver dreams of being a Bombay movie star; Indian diplomats, who as childhood friends hatched Star Trek fantasies, must boldly go into a hidden universe of conspiracy and violence; and Hamlet's jester is caught up in murderous intrigues. In Rushdie's hybrid world, an Indian guru can be a redheaded Welshman, while Christopher Columbus is an immigrant, dreaming of Western glory. Rushdie allows himself, like his characters, to be pulled now in one direction, then in another. Yet he remains a writer who insists on our cultural complexity; who, rising beyond ideology, refuses to choose between East and West and embraces the world.
©1994 Salman Rushdie (P)2016 Recorded Books