12 Salman Rushdie Books Ranked: Where to Start, What to Skip

Saleem Sinai is born in Bombay at midnight on 15 August 1947, the same minute India becomes independent, and the coincidence hands him a life that runs alongside the new country's. He also gets a telepathic link to the other children born in that hour, a nose that drips, and a family history that begins in Kashmir two generations before he exists. Saleem tells all of it out loud to Padma while working in a pickle factory, so he interrupts himself, races ahead, contradicts what he said forty pages ago, and admits when he has a date wrong. The pleasure is the crowd: six things are happening on every page.

Rashid Khalifa can hold any crowd with any story until the day the words stop coming. His son Haroun goes looking for the source of the supply, which turns out to be an ocean of stories on a hidden moon, currently being poisoned by somebody who wants silence. Rushdie wrote it for his own son during the first years in hiding, and you can feel that in it: a children's adventure with a mechanical hoopoe and a water genie, which is also the clearest argument for storytelling he has made anywhere. Under two hundred pages, and funny the way a good uncle is funny.

Moraes Zogoiby, called Moor, is born into a Cochin spice-trading family with Portuguese, Jewish and Christian branches all fighting one another, then moves into Bombay's art world in the shadow of his mother Aurora, a painter big enough to bully the city. His body ages twice as fast as everybody else's, which puts a clock inside the narration. The novel starts as a family comedy and turns, as Bombay turns, into something colder: a city that was proud of its mixing curdles into a city of strongmen and lists of who really belongs.

Omar Khayyam Shakil is born to three sisters who share one pregnancy between them and refuse to say which of them is the mother, and that is the least strange thing in this novel. The country is never called Pakistan, though Rushdie says plainly that it sits at a slight angle to the real one, and its politics run on a feud between a smooth aristocrat and a pious general. The heart of it is Sufiya Zinobia, a girl who absorbs the shame nobody else will carry. Under three hundred pages, and the comedy has teeth in it.

In February 1989 Rushdie stopped being a novelist and became a security problem, and this is his record of what followed: safe houses, aliases, a borrowed name assembled from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, publishers who wobbled, friends who did not, marriages coming apart under the pressure. He writes it in the third person, which stops it becoming a wallow and also keeps him at arm's length from himself. Six hundred and sixty pages is long, and a stretch of grievance in the middle is the price you pay for the parts that are genuinely frightening.

Gibreel Farishta, a Bombay film star who plays gods for a living, and Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor who has made himself as English as he can manage, survive the destruction of their plane and land on a beach changed. From there the novel is about migration, what England does to the people who arrive in it, and what those people do to themselves in order to be let in. Running between those chapters are dream sequences set in a desert city called Jahilia, where a merchant becomes a prophet, and those are the pages the arguments have always been about.

In August 2022 a man ran onto a stage in western New York and stabbed Rushdie in front of an audience that had come to hear him talk about keeping writers safe. Knife covers the attack, the hospital months, the loss of his right eye, and the slow return to ordinary life with his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. One long section is an imagined conversation with the attacker, whom he refuses to name in the book. The prose is the plainest he has written in decades, short chapters at the pace of a man with limited energy.

The book opens in Los Angeles with the killing of a former American ambassador by his own driver, then travels back to the Kashmir both men came out of: a village of actors and cooks where a Muslim tightrope walker and a Hindu dancer marry with the whole village standing behind them. What happens to that village across the next three decades is the real subject. Rushdie writes those early Kashmir chapters with a tenderness he rarely allows himself, and the revenge plot is only the frame he hangs them on.

A traveller turns up at Fatehpur Sikri with a story he wants to sell to the emperor: that a forgotten Mughal princess left India, ended up in Renaissance Florence, and that he is the result. The novel moves between Akbar's court, where the emperor argues with a queen he has imagined into being and with his own doubts about God, and a Florence of soldiers and schemers where Machiavelli turns up as a minor character. It is the most beautiful surface Rushdie has produced, built on visible research, and it is also the book where the least happens.

Pampa Kampana receives a gift after watching her mother die, and uses it to grow an empire called Bisnaga from seeds, whispering histories into the ears of its first citizens so they wake up with pasts they never lived. She then survives more than two centuries while her city hardens into exactly the kind of place she did not want, priest-run and suspicious of women. Rushdie frames the whole novel as a modern retelling of a found Sanskrit epic, so the voice is calm and summarising, closer to myth than to his usual racket.

Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara meet in Bombay, make music that conquers the planet, and are watched throughout by Rai, a photographer who loves Vina and gets to hold both the camera and the story. Rushdie runs the Orpheus myth underneath, so love, loss and a journey after somebody who has gone are built into the shape, and he keeps tilting reality: earthquakes arrive on cue, history goes slightly wrong on purpose. It has his most enjoyable premise and it is one of his baggiest books, six hundred pages about a band you can never actually hear.

Ismail Smile, a travelling pharmaceutical salesman soaked in television, decides a famous talk-show host is his destiny and sets off across America to reach her, accompanied by a son he has wished into existence. Around that sits a second story: the spy novelist writing Quichotte's tale, whose own life keeps rhyming with it. Rushdie pours in the opioid trade, racism on the highway, cable news, mastodons and the end of the world, which is a great deal for one novel to carry, and this one does not carry it.