Victory City

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Sid Sagar

The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries—from the transcendent imagination of Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie.

In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the Goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—literally 'victory city'—the wonder of the world.

Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's, from its literal sowing out of a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that the Goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry—with Pampa Kampana at its center.

Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, this is a saga of love, adventure and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling.

©2023 Salman Rushdie (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A superb, complex celebration of storytelling that inhabits a unique space somewhere between an epic poem, a history book, and an adventure novel with magical elements, political commentary, and even a healthy dose of romance.... ‘Victory City’ contains enough adventures and action to keep even the most demanding readers entertained, but it’s also the kind of novel that welcomes—no, that invites—introspection.... [It] feels like a triumphant scream against censorship as well as a celebration of language, storytelling, and otherness.... Literature can offer guides to a better future, even when it’s fiction about the past, and Victory City is precisely that.”—Boston Globe

“[Rushdie] has brought forth a work of cheerful fabulism that puts far more emphasis on ‘magic’ than ‘realism’—a warm space in which we might imagine a better world than our own.”—The Wall Street Journal

“In [Rushdie’s] stories, unfettered creativity rewrites the destinies laid down by dogma and law. Victory City is a fable about the power of narrative art, hitched to a historical chronicle. . . . [The] book’s joy in fictions that ‘could be as powerful as histories’ testifies to a lifetime of free-spirited invention. . . . In this novel he shows his faith in the liberating power of art.”—The Economist

“A deeply fascinating, richly symbolic tale that testifies to this power of words to conjure reality.... By posing as an Indian epic teeming with Sanskrit words and mythological characters and events, the novel explicitly places itself in that Indian narrative tradition. But Victory City is also interspersed with a nameless editor’s ironic, self-referential commentary, characteristic of Rushdie’s postmodern tricks. This hybridity, an ancient eastern wonder-tale wrapped inside a modern western novel, is one way in which the book propagates its vision of cross-cultural unity, giving form to fusion.... On the evidence of this profoundly entertaining tale...Rushdie certainly still has the gift of alchemy.... All along, [he] has been transforming this dark lead of historical reality into the brilliant gold of great stories.”—Financial Times