The Enchantress Of Florence

East meets West in a blaze of glory in Salman Rushdie’s masterful, magical story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world.

The Enchantress of Florence brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, where the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture. These two separate worlds turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both.

"The magical realism in "Enchantress" is all artifice and diversion. Its decorative beauty disguises truth, or avoids it, and keeps the reader pointlessly mystified. No style should be a substitute for a story. Plot is the hard work of novel writing. Rather than dealing with a difficult reality, which is the writer's perhaps unpleasant but necessary duty, Rushdie forces Qara Köz from the Mughal Empire into Florence to make a few dubious points, distracting readers from the logistical plot problems in the book's flabby middle. In magical realism, as it is practised by Rushdie, timelines are as naught. Simultaneity is all. This can make the work seem less like great literature and, at moments, more like automatic scribbling."  -  Amy Wilentz, Los Angeles Times

Salman Rushdie has been nominated for the Booker Prize seven times, winning in 1981, and was knighted for services to literature in 2007. Rushdie is the author of 14 novels and has also written a collection of short stories and four works of non-fiction. He joined the Companions of Honour in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in her Platinum Jubilee year.