The Golden House
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER o A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture--a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR o PBS o HARPER'S BAZAAR o ESQUIRE o FINANCIAL TIMES o THE TIMES OF INDIA
On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of "the Gardens," a cloistered community in New York's Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the residents are immediately intrigued by the eccentric newcomer and his family. Along with his improbable name, untraceable accent, and unmistakable whiff of danger, Nero Golden has brought along his three adult sons: agoraphobic, alcoholic Petya, a brilliant recluse with a tortured mind; Apu, the flamboyant artist, sexually and spiritually omnivorous, famous on twenty blocks; and D, at twenty-two the baby of the family, harboring an explosive secret even from himself. There is no mother, no wife; at least not until Vasilisa, a sleek Russian expat, snags the septuagenarian Nero, becoming the queen to his king--a queen in want of an heir.
Our guide to the Goldens' world is their neighbor René, an ambitious young filmmaker. Researching a movie about the Goldens, he ingratiates himself into their household. Seduced by their mystique, he is inevitably implicated in their quarrels, their infidelities, and, indeed, their crimes. Meanwhile, like a bad joke, a certain comic-book villain embarks upon a crass presidential run that turns New York upside-down.
Set against the strange and exuberant backdrop of current American culture and politics, The Golden House also marks Salman Rushdie's triumphant and exciting return to realism. The result is a modern epic of love and terrorism, loss and reinvention--a powerful, timely story told with the daring and panache that make Salman Rushdie a force of light in our dark new age.
Praise for The Golden House
"[A] modern masterpiece . . . telling a story full of wonder and leaving you marveling at how it ever came out of the author's head." --Associated Press
"Wildly satiric and yet piercingly real . . . If F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homer, Euripides, and Shakespeare collaborated on a contemporary fall-of-an-empire epic set in New York City, the result would be The Golden House." --Poets & Writers
"A tonic addition to American--no, world!--literature . . . a Greek tragedy with Indian roots and New York coordinates." --San Francisco Chronicle
About this Author
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of fourteen novels--including Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor's Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; and Quichotte--and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction--Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line--and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.
Reviews
Longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
"Darkly humorous and humane exploration of family, history and whether it's possible to be both truly good and wretchedly evil at the same time. . . . The Golden House shows that, at seventy, Rushdie is still a profoundly necessary voice in contemporary literature." --The Globe and Mail
"As our perspective on the world is narrowed by the claustrophobic echo chambers of Trump-favoured social media, The Golden House seeks to open it back out." --Maclean's
"The great strength of The Golden House is Rushdie's ability to balance the fairy tale tone of the story with the gritty realities both of the family's life in New York and their gradually revealed past. . . . Mystery, tragedy, family drama, coming of age story, romance, myth, satire, and on, and on--in its glorious excess, The Golden House is a fairy tale for our time." --Toronto Star
"If you read a lot of fiction, you know that every once in a while you stumble upon a book that transports you, telling a story full of wonder and leaving you marveling at how it ever came out of the author's head. The Golden House is one of those books." --The Associated Press
"My favorite Rushdie novel in years. . . . If F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homer, Euripides, and Shakespeare collaborated on a contemporary fall-of-an-empire epic set in New York City, the result would be The Golden House." --Poets & Writers
"Nuanced fury. . . . Ripe with myth and imagination. . . . If there is a theme to Rushdie's entire body of work, it is the power of story and myth to uplift and inform us. In The Golden House, he has provided us a cautionary tale, unmasked and set in the trembling present--and infused, as such, with an urgency that is impossible to ignore." --Winnipeg Free Press
"Ambitious and rewarding. . . . Replete with allusions to literature, film, mythology and politics, the novel simultaneously channels the calamities of Greek drama and the information overload of the internet. The result is a distinctively rich epic of the immigrant experience in modern America, where no amount of money or self-abnegation can truly free a family from the sins of the past." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Rushdie returns with a topical, razor-sharp portrait of life among the very rich, who are, of course, very different from the rest of us. . . . A sort of Great Gatsby for our time: everyone is implicated, no one is innocent, and no one comes out unscathed, no matter how well padded with cash." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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