Victory City

of what we now call India, Bharat, Hindustan. The old king whose rolling head got everything going wasn t much of a monarch, just the type of ersatz ruler who crops up between the decline of one great kingdom and the rise of another. His name was Kampila of the tiny principality of Kampili, Kampila Raya, raya being the regional version of raja, king. This second-­rate raya had just about enough time on his third-­rate throne to build a fourth-­rate fortress on the banks of the Pampa river, to put a fifth-­rate temple inside it, and to carve a few grandiose inscriptions into the side of a rocky hill, but then the army of the north came south to deal with him. The battle that followed was a one-sided affair, so unimportant that nobody bothered to give it a name. After the people from the north had routed Kampila Raya s forces and killed most of his army they grabbed hold of the phony king and chopped off his crownless head. Then they filled it with straw and sent it north for the pleasure of the Delhi sultan. There was nothing particularly special about the battle without a name, or about the head. In those days battles were commonplace affairs and naming them was a thing a lot of people didn t bother with; and severed heads were traveling across our great land all the time for the pleasure of this prince or that one. The sultan in his northern capital city had built up quite a collection.

After the insignificant battle, surprisingly, there was an event of the kind that changes history. The story goes that the women of the tiny, defeated kingdom, most of them recently widowed as a result of the no-­name battle, left the fourth-­rate fortress, after making final offerings at the fifth­rate temple, crossed the river in small boats, improbably defying the turbulence of the water, walked some distance to the west alon

it is utterly enchanting. . . . When you think about it, Rushdie s novels are a miracle. The Atlantic

Victory City feels like a return to form, recalling the kind of reality-bending, effortlessly erudite world-building that first defined [Rushdie s] style and may be key to his literary legacy. Los Angeles Times

A lavish fairytale [with] an infectious sense of fun. The Guardian

A grand historical fantasy . . . the latest masterpiece from a writer who has spent the last fifty years spinning tales that have breathed magic into history. Ron Charles, CBS News Sunday Morning

Victory City is a triumph [that] invites readers to reconvene with Rushdie, the humorist, artist and spinner of grand yarns. NPR

Victory City is many things: a myth, an epic, a polemic parable, a real-world historical landscape flattened into a fable and embellished by fantasy. . . . Salman Rushdie deftly weaves historical fact with mythological fiction. Vogue
 
[The] book s joy in fictions that could be as powerful as histories testifies to a lifetime of free-spirited invention. . . . In this novel [Salman Rushdie] shows his faith in the liberating power of art. The Economist

Salman Rushdie has created a radiant myth about mythmaking. Victory City is a book that privileges the ethical imagination and the unmistakable permanence of storytelling. Beyond war, beyond violence, even beyond life itself, the story, and the storyteller, last. Colum McCann

Victory City is vast and deep, soaring and scintillating. Every page is magical, every page is gorgeous. In the way of a significant work of art, it does not resemble any other novel I could name . . . A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers. Michael Cunningham

The scale and scope of his intellect and his imagination is googolplex, as big as infinity and then some. In Victory City, he spins an epic tale that brings us back to the key questions of what it is to be human, to be authentic, to love and to grieve. A. M. Homes

No one, and I mean no one, can bring an entire world to life with the authority, wisdom, humor, and panache of Salman Rushdie. In the pantheon of his novels, Victory City stands out as book of particular imaginative achievement. It defies category, but it invites pleasure. Gary Shteyngart

Victory City is a capacious and sweeping telling in which writing about the past is a way of also staring dead on at the present and historicizing human nature. In the wit and poetry of his prose, Rushdie shows us not only the world we ve made, but more importantly the one we can remake. Natasha Trethewey

This is Salman Rushdie at his most virtuosic, a wondrous tale of medieval India which is also, as ever, a fable about the triumph of life in all its joyous, messy excess over the forces of fanaticism and darkness. Hari Kunzru