The Enchantress of Florence

Synopsis

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other - the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both.

Author Biography

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in June 1947. His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight’s Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers’ Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s 25-year history. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), lead to the Iranian leadership issuing a fatwa against him. Despite the fatwa the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988. Salman Rushdie was also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. Salman Rushdie became a KBE in 2007.