The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

Published by Alfred A. Knopf , 1995, hardcover, 437 pages, condition: new.

'Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed me, Moraes Zogoiby, called 'Moor', for most of my life the only heir to the spice-trade-'n'-big-business millions of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin and of my banishment by my mother Aurora, née da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists.'

The Moor's Last Sigh begins in southern India, narrated by a picaresque hero in whose veins Portuguese, Jewish, Arab, and Indian blood runs (a representation of an individual who escapes the narrow classifications of all nationalist, ethnic, and religious sectarianisms), in a time when independence was still a dream for Indians. The work outlines an adventure that passes through the fairy-tale Bombay of the 80s and 90s and ends in southern Spain, in the shadow of the Alhambra.

In 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for writing The Satanic Verses, a work that deeply displeased Islamic fundamentalists. The author's response was this novel: a blunt defense of the virtues of pluralism and tolerance, as opposed to the unique and exclusionary truths of dictators.