A children’s book in the old, serious sense.

Written after The Satanic Verses and dedicated to his son, it turns censorship, storytelling, silence, exile, and language itself into a fable of oceans, shadows, mechanical birds, bureaucratic nonsense, and verbal mischief.

It has the surface movement of adventure fantasy, but the deeper engine is argument: what happens to a culture when stories are poisoned, controlled, drained, or made too dangerous to speak? Rushdie keeps the whole thing nimble rather than solemn — nonsense names, comic machinery, mythic structure, very deliberate silliness — but there’s real force underneath the sparkle. A book about free speech that understands storytelling is not a polite civic hobby. 

1991 Granta/Penguin paperback edition; later printing. Noticeable cover creasing, rubbing and edge wear, with light page toning. Clean, solid reading copy.