Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a vast, rock-and-roll Orpheus myth about music, fame and exile.

At its centre are Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, two Indian musicians whose romance becomes tangled with superstardom, death, earthquakes and doubles. Reality becomes unsteady, as though someone put the file in the wrong slot. 

Rushdie was already one of the major literary figures of the late twentieth century by the time this appeared, and this novel has all his usual machinery running at full tilt. It is lush with his textbook verbal abundance, mythic patterning, historical sprawl, political exile, pop culture, religion, sex, jokes, ghosts, gods and probably three more things trying to get through customs. It’s not modest. It is Rushdie doing the big maximalist circus, with amplification.

Hardback first edition, first printing, published by Jonathan Cape in 1999. Very good copy with dust jacket; light general shelfwear and minor edge wear, with clean internal pages.