4 cassettes / 6 hours
Read by Art Malik

Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. The grandeur of the achievement is this: with The Moor's Last Sigh, his first novel in seven years, Salman Rushdie gives us a masterpiece of controlled storytelling. Surpassing even the spectacular, imaginative brilliance of Midnight's Children, informed by astonishing scope and ambition, by turns compassionate, wicked, poignant, and funny, The Moor's Last Sigh is galvanizing.

"Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed: me, Moraes Zogoiby, called 'Moor' for most of my life, the only male heir to the spice-trade-'n'-big-business millions of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin, and of my banishment by my mother, Aurora, nee da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists."

The Moor evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes and the lost world of possibilities embodied by India in this century. His is a tale of premature deaths and family rifts, of thwarted loves and mad passions, of secrecy and greed, of power and money, and of the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art.

East, West, by Salman Rushdie, is also available from Random House AudioBooks.

Art Malik has extensive acting credits both here and in his native England. He is well known for playing the role of Hari Kumar in The Jewel and the Crown. His film credits include True Lies, No Place to Hide, and A Passage to India.

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NY Times Notable Book Club (118)

Malaysian Bookworms (40)

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