NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The Booker Prize-winning bestselling author of Midnight s Children and The Satanic Verses 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. Fierce phantasmagorical ... a huge sprawling exuberant novel. --The New York Times 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.