Shalimar the Clown
  • Published: 1 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407018607
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416

Shalimar the Clown

Formats & editions
EBook
1 May 2010
Paperback
2 Oct 2006
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'This is Rushdie at his most flamboyant best' John Sutherland, Financial Times


'Rushdie’s most engaging book since Midnight’s Children' Observer

Shalimar the Clown was once a figure full of love and laughter. His skill as a tightrope walker was legendary in his native home of Kashmir. But fate has played him cruelly, torn him away from his beloved home and brought him to Los Angeles, where he works as a chauffeur. One morning he gets up, goes to work, and brutally slays his employer, America’s former counter-terrorist chief Maximilian Ophuls, in full view of the victim’s illegitimate daughter, India. Despite the political overtones, it soon emerges that this is a murder with a much darker heart to it.

The killing has its roots halfway across the globe, back in Kashmir, a ruined paradise not so much lost as shattered. And gradually it emerges that beyond this unholy trinity of Max, India and Shalimar, lurks a fourth, shadowy figure, one who binds them all together.

'This is Rushdie at his most flamboyant best' Financial Times
  • Published: 1 May 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407018607
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 416
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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.

portrait photo of Salman Rushdie

Also by Salman Rushdie

Knife
Victory City
Languages of Truth
Quichotte
Midnight’s Children
The Golden House
Home
See all

Praise for Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown is Rushdie's most engaging book since Midnight's Children. It is a lament. It is a revenge story. it is a love story. And it is a warning

Observer

A brilliant symphony... Exceptional... One of Rushdie's best novels yet

Independent

Deeply disturbing and immensely moving... An exquisite, broken thing of pain and beauty

Independent

Excellent... A characteristically daring walk along the tightrope of fiction

Sunday Telegraph

Extraordinary... Worth engaging with at every level; a thrilling story told in thrilling language

The Times

I'd say it's his best novel yet

Daily Telegraph

Passionate, well-informed

London Review of Books

The story is exciting and memorably analyses the way in which fanaticism can wreck the most inoffensive lives

Mail on Sunday

There are some breathtakingly eloquent passages

Spectator

This is an important book... Wonderful

The Times
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