The Enchantress of Florence - Hardcover

'it is the hand of the master artist, past all explanation, that gives this book its glamour and its power, its humour and shock, its verve, its glory. It is a wonderful tale full of follies and enchantments. East meets west with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks' -- Guardian Review

`(Rushdie) has a rare mastery of language, and when you read his work you cannot help but feel you are in the company of a mighty intelligence...Salman Rushdie is undoubtedly one of our greatest storytellers' -- The Daily Herald

`For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician's wand. There is more magic than realism in this latest novel. But it is, I think, one of his best. If The Enchantress of Florence doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it' -- Financial Times Magazine

`Rushdie is the master of spinning threads across cultures, time and place' -- Psychologies

`SALMAN RUSHDIE'S new novel is a hall of mirrors. They distort and flatter, and above all, like those mirrors set by exits onto dangerous roads, they reveal what is hidden. Two great civilisations, the Moghul empire of Jalalluddin Muhammed Akbar, and the Florence of the Medicis and of Machiavelli, reflect on each other while they are linked by a series of fairytale improbabilities... It's a haul of stories, gathered with magpie glee, arranged to glitter. Self-consciousness is one of the book's main purposes. Rushdie keeps coming back to his reflections on the nature of story itself, and the way in which a human being understands himself and his dilemma through story... Rushdie brilliantly describes the imprisonment and torture of Machiavelli, and the influence of the dungeon on Machiavelli's ideas.... The Enchantress is not really about Qara Köz, or Simonetta Vespucci, or any other fabulous beauty. For all its proliferating surface dazzle, this is a book with few illusions. One after another the stories drop like masks. The solitude, harshness and illogicality of human life are accepted almost casually, without surprise' -- The Times

`The Enchantress of Florence is vintage Rushdie and reminds us, in case we may have forgotten, that he can tell a story across East and West better than anyone else in the language' -- Sunday Telegraph

`This is a rich feast of a book... richly imagined' -- The Scotsman

`carefully wrought and often exquisite' -- The Economist

`mesmerising, picaresque... It is a boisterous tale piled high with sex and adventure and fantasy'
-- Tatler

`it braids love, magic and the storyteller's teasing art into a yarn as rich as any he has spun'
-- Independent

A gorgeous, sensual novel set in Mughal India and Renaissance Florence.