Written after Rushdie travelled through Nicaragua in 1986, following revolution, counter-revolution, foreign intervention, cultural myth and everyday life.

Rushdie meets government figures, journalists, artists and ordinary Nicaraguans, moving between admiration for the Sandinista project and discomfort with censorship, political orthodoxy and the moral simplifications revolutions tend to demand. 

Rushdie makes clear that he is not a neutral observer. His way of catching political commitment, is in order to expose it becoming complicated in real time. He is attentive to poetry, jokes, architecture, bureaucracy and contradiction, giving Nicaragua real texture and heart. Brief, subjective, argumentative, and alert to the point at which solidarity becomes another way of refusing to look closely. 

Picador / Pan Books in association with Jonathan Cape, London, 1987. Picador paperback edition. Light shelf wear and age toning; internally clean and sound.