SOURCE: A review of The Moor's Last Sigh, in The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, January 21, 1996, p. L11.

In the following review, Ryan describes The Moor's Last Sigh as "an extraordinary act of the imagination."

In 1989, Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses earned its author a fatwa, a death decree, declared by the Ayatollah Khomeini because of the book's alleged blasphemy of Islam. Among the ironies was the clear fact that The Satanic Verses was far from being Rushdie's best or most persuasive work. Since then, while living in hiding (and puckishly popping up in all sorts of places, including David Letterman's TV show), Rushdie has published short fiction, book reviews and essays, but The Moor's Last Sigh is his first full-fledged novel since The Satanic Verses, and it is as good as—maybe better than—his earlier best work, Midnight's Children.

In that 1990 novel, Rushdie—who was born in...