**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE**

**SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**

Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with the TV star Salman R. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where 'Anything-Can-Happen'. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse, with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work. The fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Prizes

Short-listed for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2019

Rushdie is one of the greats of his generation… But it’s rare for a writer to produce their best work towards the end of their career… Quichotte is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism… This novel can fly, it can float, it’s anecdotal, effervescent, charming, and a jolly good story to boot… Encore! Encore! * Sunday Times *
A brilliant, funny, world-encompassing wonder… His readers realize that they would happily follow Rushdie to the end of the world… a glimmer of hope, like an impossible dream, is left for us [in Quichotte]. * Time Magazine *
A triumphant assault on the coarsened American sensibility… [A] packed, funny, melancholy, masterpiece of a novel. * The Times *
A novel that is as sharp as a flick-knife and as clever as a barrel of monkeys... More than just another postmodern box of tricks, [Quichotte] is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind. * The Times *
Rushdie’s fans will find much to love in this hyperactive, tenchicolour satire… Many balls are juggles here, but, somehow, Rushdie keeps them all gloriously in the air. * Daily Mail *
Quichotte is cleverly plotted and compellingly paced, a constant reminder that precious few writers can manoeuvre a sentence like Rushdie, and a moving story about love and the importance of family too… In other words, Quichotte is a sort of manifesto about the power of fiction. * Times Literary Supplement *
A fast-spinning postmodern double Catherine wheel – impossible not to be dazzled by… exhilarating. * Independent *
This is the Rushdie we still need: eviscerator of the powers-that-be, who destroys rather than creates illusions... Here is a language adequate to our times. * Telegraph *
Very much a Don Quixote for our times… a wild, enjoyable ride. * Evening Standard *
[A] modern Don Quixote... Rushdie has created something that feels wholly original even if you’ve never heard of the hopelessly romantic Spanish knight-errant who sees danger in windmills... Lucky for us, there are true storytellers and Rushdie is near the top of that list. If you haven’t read him before, this is a good book to start with—it’s fabulist and funny while revealing an awful lot about the world we live in today. * Associated Press *

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. 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.