September 2010:

Summary:

(From Barnes & Noble)

After drinking an elixir that bestows him with immortality, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next 700 years sailing the seas with the burden of living forever. Eventually he grows weary of the sameness of life and journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and he sets out to scale the island's peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face to face with the island's creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity.

About the author:

(From Barnes & Noble)

POne of the most celebrated writers of our time, SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of ten previous novels- Grimus, Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and, in 2008, 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, and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published four works of non-fiction, a collection of short stories, and edited two fiction anthologies. In June 2007, Rushdie was appointed a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. He holds the rank Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France and began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007. In May 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and also in 2008, the London Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". For two years he served as president of The PEN American Center, the world's oldest human rights organization, and is the chair of PEN's World Voices Festival of International Literature, an annual literary festival he began in New York in 2001. Rushdie is currently working on the film version of Midnight's Children.