SOURCE: A review of The Moor's Last Sigh, in Booklist, Vol. 92, No. 5, November 1, 1995, p. 435.

In the following review, Hooper describes The Moor's Last Sigh as "a marvelously wrought novel, guaranteed to entrance."

Rushdie's first novel since the fateful Satanic Verses (1989) is about hybridization of cultures, and itself seems a hybrid between William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County novels and The Thousand and One Nights. This four-generational family saga takes place in Rushdie's native southern India and witnesses the decline of a spice-trading dynasty, a century-long drama of "family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art." The fanciful tale is related by the last of the exhausted family line, Moraes Zogoiby, son of a pair of Indians of far different backgrounds and persuasions, his father Jewish and a Mob leader...