Black smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness factories and hung over the city like bad news.Īnd in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which (so I’m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of it. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue. There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. ‘Rushdie’s most eloquent and compelling gesture as a writer, father and citizen’ - Edward Said, ‘A lively, wonderfully inventive comic tale … his own Sea of Stories from which he drew this entertaining and moving book continues to flow as clear and brilliant as ever’ - Alison Lurie, His books have been translated into many different languages. Salman Rushdie is an Honorary Professor in Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1990 he received the Writers’ Guild Award for Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He is the author of several novels for adults, including Midnight’s Children (winner of the 1993 Booker Prize), Shame and The Satanic Verses (winner of the 1988 Whitbread Prize for Best Novel). Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947.

The novel haroun and the sea of stories