New Salman Rushdie novel depicts Obama, Trump’s US
The Golden House, due out in September, portrays the life of a young film-maker amid the political upheavals of recent US history
Promising to be the “ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies”, a new novel by Salman Rushdie dramatising the last eight years of US politics has been announced by his publisher for release in September.
According to publisher Jonathan Cape, ‘The Golden House’, Rushdie’s 13th novel, follows “a young American filmmaker whose involvement with a secretive, tragedy-haunted family teaches him how to become a man”. Starting with the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2008, the book will include current and recent political and social events, including the rise of the ultra-conservative Tea Party; the Gamergate scandal, which saw the widespread online harassment of female gaming journalists framed as a debate about media ethics; the debate over identity politics; and, perhaps most urgently, “the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair”.
Publishing director at Jonathan Cape, Michal Shavit called it “the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies” for “a new world order of alternate truths”. She said The Golden House was “a brilliant, heartbreaking, realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world’s greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers”.
Rushdie is best known for his 1988 novel ‘The Satanic Verses’, which was alleged to have traduced the prophet Muhammad, and resulted in him receiving death threats and being forced into hiding with roundthe-clock police protection.
His last novel, 2015’s ‘Two Years Eight Months and TwentyEight Nights’ - the equivalent of 1,001 nights, a reference to the classic collection of tales - tells the story of a war between the human world and another populated with jinn over generations. That book also starred a certain US president: “an unusually intelligent man, eloquent, thoughtful, subtle, measured in word and deed, a good dancer (though not as good as his wife) … handsome (if a little jugeared).” It was widely praised as a return to form for Rushdie after his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, with Ursula Le Guin writing in her review that readers should “admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness, humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit”.