WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ETRANGER "Rushdie's novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush...each paragraph luxurious and delicious."
–The New Yorker "There can seldom have been so robust and baroque an incarnation of the political novel as
Shame. It can be read as a fable, polemic, or excoriation; as history or as fiction.... This is the novel as myth and as satire."
–Sunday Telegraph "
Shame is and is not about Pakistan, that invented, imaginary country, 'a failure of the dreaming mind.'... Rushdie shows us with what fantasy our sort of history must now be written–if, that is, we are to penetrate it, and perhaps even save it." –
The Guardian
"Swift in
Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire in
Candide, Sterne in
Tristram Shandy...Rushdie, it seems to me, is very much a latter-day member of their company."
–The New York Times Book Review
"A pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives."
–The Times (UK)