Rushdie, Salman - The Moor's Last Sigh (Vintage, 1997)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love.
"Fierce, phantasmagorical . a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel." —The New York Times
Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.