Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights A novel

<i><b>NEW YORK TIMES</b></i> <b>BESTSELLER * </b>NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY <i>The Washington Post * Los Angeles Times * Harper's Bazaar * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * The Guardian * National Post * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews</i><br> <br> From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, <i>Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</i> is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.<br> <br> In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor's office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.<br> <br> Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.<br> <br> Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia's children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights--or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.<br> <br> Inspired by the traditional "wonder tales" of the East, Salman Rushdie's novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today's world. <i>Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</i> is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.<br> <br> <b>Praise for <i>Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</i></b><br> <br> "Courageous and liberating . . . a breathless mash-up of wormholes, mythical creatures, current affairs and disquisitions on philosophy and theology."<b>--<i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br> <br> "Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril."<b>--Ursula K. Le Guin, <i>The Guardian</i></b><br> <br> "An amusement park of a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of control by being grounded by religion, history, culture and love."<b>--<i>Los Angeles Times</i></b><br> <br> "[A] rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable, perhaps his most thoroughly enjoyable to date . . . fantastically inventive, spirited, astute, and delectable."<b>--<i>Booklist</i> (starred review)</b><br> <br> "A composite of magic realism, mythology, science fiction and straight-up fantasy . . . Like the best Rushdie novels, <i>Two Years</i> is playful and inventive, and also intellectually bracing."<b>--<i>The Globe and Mail</i></b><br> <br> "Incandescent . . . All those years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel."<b>--<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b>