Ormus, who Vina is also in love with, immediately recalls Freddie Mercury of the band Queen, who has many similarities. He basically devotes his whole life to Vina and the language is so strong that by the end, you forget that these characters really are fictional and didn't exist. We follow the story of Rai, a photographer who falls precariously in love with Vina in India while still very much a boy.

Rushdie creates the story of a band and music that grows to epic proportions. He fills his writing with countless references to mythology and history in a way that I find rewarding but some may find difficult. I think Rushdie can be a bit daunting sometimes because he's really an intellectual through and through. It is a tale of love, death, and rock 'n' roll. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, an account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy, high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. And lives to tell the tale.Īround these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings.

Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her 'back-door man,' the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humor, and love, is perhaps the book's true hero. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. From the world renowned author o f Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses comes Salman Rushdie's brilliant novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, featuring an epic, exuberant love story with a rock 'n' roll soundtrack.Īt the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes.

The ground beneath her feet rushdie