The Enchantress of Florence - Softcover

"A brilliant, fascinating, generous novel...wonderful" -- Ursula le Guin Guardian "A wild and whirling novel" Observer "For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician's wand. There is more magic than realism in this latest novel. But it is, I think, one of his best. If The Enchantress of Florence doesn't win this year's Man Booker I'll curry my proof copy and eat it" Financial Times "My first desire on finishing it was to go back and re-read it. Like all of Rushdie's work, the playfulness, the passion, the erudition and the sensuousness go hand in hand. It's immensely rich...it's one of his best" Scotsman "An exuberant mix of fantasy and history" Daily Mail

Discover this magnificent magical novel from the Booker-prize winning author of Midnight's Children.

When a young European traveller arrives at Sikri, the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar, the tale he spins brings the whole imperial capital to the brink of obsession. He calls himself ‘Mogor dell’Amore’, the Mughal of Love, and claims to be the son of a lost princess, whose name and very existence has been erased from the country’s history: Qara Köz, or ‘Lady Black Eyes’.

Lady Black Eyes is a fabled beauty believed to possess great powers of enchantment and sorcery. After a series of abductions by besotted warlords, she finds herself carried to Machiavellian Florence. In her attempts to command her own destiny in a world ruled by men, Lady Black Eyes brings together the two great cities of sensual Florence and hedonistic Sikri, so far apart and yet so alike, and two worlds become dangerously entwined.

‘Vintage Rushdie...reminds us, in case we may have forgotten, that he can tell a story across East and West better than anyone else in the language’ Sunday Telegraph