The Moor's Last Sigh

First published in 1995, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh is an exuberant family saga that unfolds across the tumultuous history of modern India. Its narrator, Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby, is the last son of an extraordinary dynasty whose fortunes intertwine with those of Cochin and Bombay, whose members are divided by religion, ambition, artistic rivalry and consuming love. Born to Aurora da Gama, a celebrated painter descended from Portuguese Catholic spice merchants, and Abraham Zogoiby, a Jewish businessman with darker affiliations, Moraes inherits a family history as extravagant and contradictory as the country itself. From the world of Indian commerce and politics to an exile in southern Spain, his story moves through generations of passion, betrayal and loss, with Rushdie’s characteristic appetite for the marvellous illuminating the fractures beneath the family’s splendour.

Rich in wordplay, historical allusion and magical-realist invention, the novel explores religious pluralism, cultural identity, the seductions of power and the uneasy relationship between art and life. Its title evokes the fall of Muslim Granada in 1492, drawing a line between the expulsion of Spain’s Moors and Jews and the contested histories of belonging in modern India. Following Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Rushdie again turns the family novel into a panoramic, irreverent meditation on a nation’s imagination and its divisions. Shortlisted for the 1995 Booker Prize and awarded the Whitbread Novel Award, The Moor’s Last Sigh stands among his major explorations of history as a story continually rewritten by those who inherit it.

From the book

“A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”

— Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

On The Moor’s Last Sigh

“Fierce, phantasmagorical … a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.”

— The New York Times