Salman Rushdie Books in Order

After drinking an elixir, Flapping Eagle spends centuries wandering without aging. Weary of immortality, he reaches Calf Island, where other outcasts live beneath a mountain and a mysterious power threatens his search for an ordinary human existence.

Born at the moment India gains independence, Saleem Sinai discovers a telepathic connection to other children born that midnight. His family's upheavals and his unusual powers become entangled with the conflicts of the newly independent nation.

Hashim, a wealthy moneylender, finds a silver pendant containing a strand of the Prophet's hair. His decision to keep the relic brings religious fervor into his household, disrupting family relationships and drawing others into its dangerous influence.

In a country resembling Pakistan, two powerful men and their families struggle over authority, honor, and disgrace. Their intertwined lives expose the violence that grows from suppressed shame, political ambition, and the demands placed on women.

During a visit to Nicaragua in 1986, Rushdie encounters a country caught between Sandinista revolutionary hopes and pressure from the United States. His account brings political observations together with conversations about poetry, everyday life, and national identity.

Two Indian actors survive an explosion aboard a London-bound aircraft and fall to earth undergoing extraordinary transformations. Their altered lives unfold amid migration, religious visions, racial hostility, and questions about the identities they have left behind.

When his storyteller father loses the ability to tell stories, Haroun sets out to restore his gift. A journey to the Sea of Stories draws the boy into a struggle against forces determined to silence storytelling itself.

Responding to the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, Rushdie explains his intentions as a novelist and addresses accusations against the book. This short essay considers religious offense, interpretation, and the space fiction needs to question received beliefs.

These essays and reviews examine literature, cinema, migration, racism, colonial legacies, and religious fundamentalism. Writing across a decade of cultural and political disputes, Rushdie considers how imagination and freedom of expression shape the lives of displaced people.

Rushdie revisits the MGM film that influenced his childhood imagination, examining its fantasy world and its ideas about home. Film criticism and personal memories connect Dorothy's journey with questions of belonging, escape, and exile.

Nine stories move between Eastern and Western settings, exploring the desires, misunderstandings, and compromises that cross cultural boundaries. Religious objects, popular culture, migration, and private relationships become points of contact between lives shaped by different traditions.

Exiled storyteller Moraes Zogoiby retraces the fortunes of his family, a dynasty of spice merchants and criminals from Cochin. Traveling from India to Spain, he searches through inherited hatreds, artistic obsessions, and mysteries surrounding his mother.

Edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, this anthology gathers Indian writing from the fifty years after independence. Fiction, novel excerpts, and memoir present different experiences of a changing country through the work of numerous authors.

Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West assemble fiction and nonfiction spanning India's first fifty years of independence. The selections bring together different writers, regions, and personal histories, tracing literary responses to the country's changing social and cultural life.

Singer Vina Apsara disappears during an earthquake, leaving musician Ormus Cama and photographer Rai Merchant bound by their love for her. Their shared history unfolds through the rise of global rock music and a reimagining of Orpheus.

Historian and dollmaker Malik Solanka leaves his wife and child in London for New York, hoping to escape his own anger. The city's wealth, restlessness, and violence instead confront him with disturbing reflections of his inner turmoil.

Essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces from 1992 to 2002 range across literature, popular culture, political violence, and free expression. Rushdie reflects on the fatwa, September 11, and the physical and imaginative borders people attempt to cross.

A former American ambassador is murdered in Los Angeles by his Kashmiri driver, Shalimar. The crime connects the ambassador's daughter to a history of love, betrayal, and political violence stretching from Kashmir to Europe and California.

Guest editor Salman Rushdie selects twenty stories for the 2008 edition of this annual anthology. Work by Alice Munro, T. C. Boyle, and others explores troubled relationships, moral uncertainty, family conflict, and departures from ordinary reality.

A European traveler arrives at Emperor Akbar's court claiming a family connection through an extraordinary woman. His account links Mughal India and Renaissance Florence, where beauty, storytelling, political power, and a woman's pursuit of independence intersect.

This stage adaptation follows children born with supernatural gifts at the moment of India's independence. Two boys switched at birth connect private family histories with national upheaval, exploring identity and belonging across decades of political change.

Seven bird-themed tales and literary selections bring together writers including Daphne du Maurier, Salman Rushdie, Edgar Allan Poe, and Julian Barnes. Real and imagined birds become unsettling presences in stories of menace, mystery, and symbolic obsession.

When storyteller Rashid Khalifa falls into a mysterious sleep, his twelve-year-old son Luka enters a magical world to save him. Accompanied by unusual animal friends, he must overcome its dangers and obtain the Fire of Life.

After a death sentence is issued against him over The Satanic Verses, Rushdie lives under police protection using an assumed name. This memoir recounts the disruption to his family, work, and friendships during years of threatened violence.

A storm in New York awakens extraordinary abilities in people descended from a jinn princess. As the barrier between their worlds breaks down, these unsuspecting descendants become involved in a conflict between powerful supernatural forces.

Drawing on Shame, Imaginary Homelands, and East, West, this selection explores the meaning of home through fiction and essays. Memories, migration, and imagined homelands raise questions about roots, belonging, and the places people carry within themselves.

A wealthy stranger calling himself Nero Golden settles in Manhattan with his three adult sons. A young filmmaker becomes fascinated by the family, whose concealed past, rivalries, and relationships unfold against America's shifting political and cultural atmosphere.

An aging traveling salesman becomes obsessed with a television star and sets out across America to win her love. This reworking of Don Quixote connects his improbable quest with a world increasingly shaped by entertainment and distorted reality.

Essays written between 2003 and 2020 explore storytelling, literature, art, migration, and censorship. Reflecting on writers and cultural arguments, Rushdie considers the relationship between imaginative freedom and the struggle to establish truth in public life.

In fourteenth-century India, young Pampa Kampana receives a goddess's power and helps bring a city into existence. Across generations, she seeks a society where women have agency, while ambition and religious conflict threaten her vision.

Salman Rushdie recounts the 2022 attack that nearly killed him and the long process of recovery. His reflections connect the violence and its aftermath with love, family support, literature, and the effort to rebuild a life.

Five stories set in India, England, and America explore approaching death and the lives left behind. Quarrelling elders, a vengeful ghost, a magical musician, and a writer investigating his mentor confront questions of legacy, identity, and freedom.