February Fiction

History and magical realism are woven together in Salman Rushdie's wild new novel

- James Walton

Victory City

by Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape, £22

IF THERE WAS a competition for the best pastiche of the opening words of a Salman Rushdie novel, a pretty good - entry might be: "On the last day of her life, when she was 247 years old, the blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga". By coincidence, these are also the opening words of Victory City, a book Rushdie finished shortly before last summer's tragic stabbing.

From there, he goes on to retell the events laid out in Pampa's poem and to prove all over again that nobody else writes novels quite like this, where history and magical realism are perfectly intertwined.