'There can seldom have been so robust and baroque an incarnation of the political novel as Shame. It can be read as a fable, polemic or excoriation; as history or as fiction... This is the novel as myth and as satire' 

Sunday Telegraph 


'Shame is and is not about Pakistan, that invented, imaginary country, "a failure of the dreaming mind"... The theme is shame and shamelessness, born from the violence which is modern history. Revelation and obscurity, affairs ofhonour, blushings of all parts, the recession of erotic life, the open violence of public life, create the extraordinary Rushdie mood... Rushdie shows us with what fantasy our sort of history must now be written - if, that is, we are to penetrate it, and perhaps even save it' 


Malcolm Bradbury, Guardian 


'Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives' 

The Times