Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel

<i><b>NEW YORK TIMES </b></i><b>BESTSELLER • <b>NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY <i>The Washington Post • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Harper’s Bazaar • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • The Kansas City Star • National Post • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews</i></b><br /></b><br />From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, <i>Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</i> is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.<br /><br /> In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.<br /><br /> Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.<br /><br /> Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.<br /><br /> Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. <i>Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</i> is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.<br /><br /><b>Praise for <i>Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</i></b><br /><br />“Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.”<b>—Ursula K. Le Guin, <i>The Guardian</i></b><br /><br /> “One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”<b>—<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b><br /><br /> “A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”<b>—<i>USA Today</i></b><br /><br /> “A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.”<b>—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br /><br /> “Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his voice.”<b><i>—The Boston Globe</i></b><br /><br /><br /><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>