From the Booker Prize-winning bestselling author of Midnight s Children and The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring extravagant comical and humane this book renews Rushdie s stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence. Richly nuanced full or humor bitter anger an embracing tenderness and a buyancy of language. --Boston Globe