A grotesque, feverish political fable from Salman Rushdie, Shame turns the history of Pakistan into something unstable, comic and brutal.

Families rise and rot, tyrants perform morality, private disgrace becomes public myth, and the whole thing moves with Rushdie’s usual excess: satire, allegory, gossip, history, and fable all shoved into the same overheated room.

It is one of Rushdie’s sharper political novels: less sprawling than Midnight’s Children, but similarly concerned with the way nations invent themselves through violence, humiliation and convenient lies. A good one for readers interested in postcolonial fiction, political satire, magical realism and the ugly theatre of power.

First Picador paperback edition. Good condition with general age and shelf wear.