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  • Published: 19 May 2020
  • ISBN: 9781529111989
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $22.99

Quichotte




The epic new novel from the Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie – a playful inversion of Don Quixote set in contemporary America.

***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019***


In a tour-de-force that is a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.

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 the TV star Salman R. 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 satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse, with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work. The fully realised 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.

  • Published: 19 May 2020
  • ISBN: 9781529111989
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Also by Salman Rushdie

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Praise for Quichotte

A delightful confectionHumane and humorous. Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.

Kirkus Reviews *starred review*

Rushdie’s rambunctious latest... [is an] uproarious comedy a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times.

Publishers Weekly *starred review*

Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials.

Booklist *starred review*

This is the Rushdie we still need: eviscerator of the powers-that-be, who destroys rather than creates illusions... Here is a language adequate to our times.

Vidyan Ravin thiran, Telegraph

Quichotte overwhelms you from the first page with a lightning storm of ideas and a monsoon of exuberant proseQuichotte has all the verbal pyrotechnics and outlandish invention that will be familiar to readers of Rushdie’s fourteen previous novels, but at the heart it is a serious and affecting tale about the irresistible pull of history… those who are prepared to sit back and enjoy the ride will encounter scenery like none they have ever seen.

Literary Review

A novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys... More than just another postmodern box of tricks, [Quichotte] is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

Rushdie is one of the greats of his generationBut it’s rare for a writer to produce their best work towards the end of their careerQuichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism… This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot… Encore! Encore!

Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

Very much a Don Quixote for our times a wild, enjoyable ride.

Ian Thomson, Evening Standard

About a dozen pages into Quichotte, Salman Rushdie’s 14th novel, we read of an invention so devious, so outrageous, that it dispels any thought that the author’s imaginative powers might be waning… It’s a masterstroke in an uneven but diverting and occasionally brilliant novel… [and] a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.

Christian Lorentzen, Financial Times

Rushdie’s most personal novel for years… a truly imaginative response to his own experience of exile and dislocation.

Allan Massie, Scotsman

A triumphant assault on the coarsened American sensibility… [A] packed, funny, melancholy, masterpiece of a novel.

Andrew Billen, The Times

Quichotte is funny… beautiful, lucid prose.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, Observer

This sardonic portrait of America combines exuberant humour with sober reflections on the toxic excesses of 21st-century media.

Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday

A fast-spinning postmodern double Catherine wheel – impossible not to be dazzled by exhilarating.

Holly Williams, Independent

A brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder… His readers realize that they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of the world… a glimmer of hope, like an impossible dream, is left for us [in Quichotte].

Nicholas Mancusi, Time Magazine

A genre-hopping, cross-country picaresque which rips along with a great deal of wit, verve and empathy.

Dorian Lynskey, iNews

Rushdie’s fans will find much to love in this hyperactive, tenchicolour satire… Many balls are juggles here, but, somehow, Rushdie keeps them all gloriously in the air.

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

Now in his eighth decade, it is clear he [Rushdie] still possesses the linguistic energy, resourcefulness and sheer amplitude of a writer half his age – buoyant and life-enhancing qualities shared by his great Spanish predecessor [Cervantes]

Jude Cook

[A] modern Don Quixote... Rushdie has created something that feels wholly original even if you’ve never heard of the hopelessly romantic Spanish knight-errant who sees danger in windmills... Lucky for us, there are true storytellers and Rushdie is near the top of that list. If you haven’t read him before, this is a good book to start with—it’s fabulist and funny while revealing an awful lot about the world we live in today.

Associated Press

Rushdie’s Booker-longlisted fourteenth novel is certainly the work of a frisky imagination... You can’t help being charmed by Rushdie’s largesse.

Guardian

Hilarious by all accounts.

LitHub

[Quichotte] is Don Quixote for our time, a smart satire of every aspect of the contemporary culture. Witty, profound, tender, this love story shows a fiction master at his brilliant best.

Millions

Rushdie’s novel is many things beyond just a Don Quixote retelling. It’s a satire on our contemporary fake-news, post-truth, Trumpian cultural moment, where the concept of reality itself is coming apart. It’s a sci-fi novel, a spy novel, a road trip novel, a work of magical realism. It’s a climate change parable, and an immigrant story in an era of anti-immigration feeling. It’s a love story that turns into a family drama... Characters, narratives and worlds collide and come apart in spectacular fashion, while Rushdie maintains an exhilarating control over it all.

Independent

Nothing but extraordinary... This incisively outlandish but lyrical meditation on intolerance, TV addiction, and the opioid crisis operates on multiple planes, with razor-sharp topicality and humor, delivering a reflective examination of the plight of marginalized personhood with veritable aplomb. Highly recommended.

Library Journal (starred review)

Quichotte is a story of breathtaking intellectual scope... Like Cervantes, Rushdie is able to balance his commentary with a voice full of tragicomic fervor, which makes the novel a thrilling adventure on a sentence-by-sentence level and another triumph for Rushdie.

Bookpage (starred review)

Quichotte is cleverly plotted and compellingly paced, a constant reminder that precious few writers can manoeuvre a sentence like Rushdie, and a moving story about love and the importance of family too… In other words, Quichotte is a sort of manifesto about the power of fiction.

Alexander Nurnberg, Times Literary Supplement

A meditation on life, death and the stories told about both.

UK Press Syndication

The fiction about fiction that takes the breath away… Quichotte expertly does it again.

Michael Wood, London Review of Books

Funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero… [Quichotte is] compelling.

Lucasta Miller, Spectator

Rushdie is a master storyteller who weaves his fictions and characters into such agreeable tapestries.

Sarah Hayes, Tablet

The novel's dazzling virtuosity and cascade of cultural references culminate in a final moving moment of hope

Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

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