The Moor's Last Sigh - Tapa dura

What do we do when the world's walls - its family structures, its value-systems, its political forms - crumble? The central character of this novel, 'Moor' Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic-bohemian Bombay family , finds himself at such a moment of crisis. His mother, a famous painter and an emotional despot, worships beauty, but Moor is ugly, he has a deformed hand. Moor falls in love, with a married woman; when their secret is revealed, both are expelled: a suicide pact is proposed, but only the woman dies. Moor chooses to accept his fate, plunges, into a life of depravity in Bombay, then leaves for London where he becomes embroiled in a major financial scandal. The novel ends in Spain, in the studio of a painter who was the lover of Moor's mother: in a violent climax Moor has, once more, to decide whether to save the life of his lover by sacrificing his own.

Salman Rushdie's nine earlier books include Midnight's Children (which won the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Shame (awarded the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger) and East, West, all published in paperback by Vintage. is novel The Satanic Verses won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, and Haround and the Sea of Stories won a Writers' Guild Award. Salman Rushdie received Germany's Author of the Year Award in 1989 for The Satanic Verses. In 1993, Midnight's Children was adjudged the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker in its first twenty-five years. In the same year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He books have been published in twenty-five languages.