The Satanic Verses

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [xii], 3–546, [4]. Dark blue cloth, lettered and ruled in gilt to spine; laid endpapers. First issue dustwrapper, featuring an image from 'Rustam Killing the White Demon' from the Victoria and Albert Museum, with the pre-publication price of £12.95 net on the front flap and with the photographer's name alongside the author's photo to rear panel. [The name was later removed, to protect the photographer from the baying mob]. The trade edition, issued concurrently with the limited issues of the 12 lettered and 100 numbered copies. Published September 26, 1988 in the U.K., therefore preceding the U.S. edition by some five months.

Fine / Fine.

Author's fourth novel. Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Prize for Fiction. Shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize (losing out to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda). Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, fall earthward from a bombed jet toward the sea, singing rival verses in an eternal wrestling match between good and evil. A whimsical and fantastic tale, as viewed through the prism of a magical realist lens. Its publication ignited an on-going debate on the dividing lines between freedom of expression, censorship, and religious tolerance.

The book's reference to several verses that Satan allegedly tricked Muhammad into including in the Qur'an, and which were later expunged, as claimed by the controversial Arabian historian Ibn Ishaq, were the main source for the fatwa (religious edict) conferred upon Rushdie by Iran's spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was officially lifted by his successors in September 1998 and the state-sanctioned reward nullified.

Despite all this, Rushdie was repeatedly stabbed at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state on 12 August 1922, as he was about to deliver a lecture. He ruefully reflects on this attack which caused him to lose sight in his right eye, as well as the use of his left hand, in his 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. "Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary... a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination." –The Guardian