Victory City

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries--from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie.

In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for her namesake, the goddess Pampa, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga--"victory city"--the wonder of the world.

Over the next 250 years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's, from its literal sowing from a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry--with Pampa Kampana at its center.

Brilliantly narrated in the style of an ancient epic, Victory City is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.

Reviews

"Rushdie returns to the realm of magic realism and to the India of his birth. . . . A grand entertainment, in a tale with many strands, by an ascended master of modern legend." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Victory City is vast and deep, soaring and scintillating. Every page is magical, every page is gorgeous. In the way of a significant work of art, it does not resemble any other novel I could name. A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers." --Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

"No one, and I mean no one, can bring an entire world to life with the authority, wisdom, humor and panache of Salman Rushdie. In the pantheon of his novels, Victory City stands out as a book of particular imaginative achievement. It defies category, but it invites pleasure." --Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

"This is Salman Rushdie at his most virtuosic, a wondrous tale of medieval India which is also, as ever, a fable about the triumph of life--in all its joyous, messy excess--over the forces of fanaticism and darkness." --Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill

"Salman Rushdie is a genius and I wish he could read me a story--or a chapter of his book--every night before bed. The scale and scope of his intellect and his imagination is googolplex, as big as infinity, and then some. In Victory City, he spins an epic tale that brings us back to the key questions of what it is to be human, to be authentic, to love and to grieve." --A.M. Homes, author of The Unfolding

"Victory City is a capacious and sweeping telling in which writing about the past is a way of also staring dead on at the present and historicizing human nature. In the wit and poetry of his prose, Rushdie shows us not only the world we've made, but--more importantly--the one we can remake."--Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Memorial Drive

"Reading this book will make you feel the same excitement you felt at discovering the Brothers Grimm when you were a child--but it's for grown-ups! It will show you the adult world in a whole new light. Only a master storyteller can do that." --Jarvis Cocker, author of Good Pop, Bad Pop

"Salman Rushdie has created a radiant myth about mythmaking. Victory City is a book that privileges the ethical imagination and the unmistakable permanence of storytelling. Within these pages, you will find global travelers, rapacious kings, cave dwellers, prophets of doom, and, at the novel's fierce and eloquent heart, a storyteller who reminds that death may take away a lot of things, but never the power of our words. Beyond war, beyond violence, even beyond life itself, the story, and the storyteller, last." --Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin

Author Bio

SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His books have been translated into over forty languages. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre tranger; the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN America, Rushdie was knighted by the Queen in 2007 for services to literature, and in June 2022 named to the exclusive Companion of Honour award in the Queen's Jubilee Honours.