The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Tapa dura

At the beginning of this overwhelming novel, Vina Aspara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devasting 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 finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. The story of a love that stretches across their whole lives, and even beyond death. Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her "back-door man", the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humour and love, is perhaps the books true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. And lives to tell the tale. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. In the words of one of Ormus Cama's songs, it shouldn't be this way. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act.

Salman Rushdie is the author of six previous novels - Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and The Moor's Last Sigh - and one work of short stories entitled East, West. He has also published three works of non-ficition - The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz - and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. He has received many awards for his writing, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight's Children was adjudged the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years.