Rashid is the Shah of Blah, with oceans of notions and the Gift of the Gab. Ask the Shah of Blah for a story and you won't get any old story. Nor will you get just one. You'll get many stories, hundreds of stories, funny and sad stories all of them juggled at once, complete with bits of sorcery and bits of love, princess, wicked uncles and fat aunts, mustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants and half a dozen catchy tunes. But one day things-many things-go terribily wrong. Rashid is left by his wife. Then, when Rashid opens his mouth, no story comes out: only a horrid barking sound. The Shah of Blah has lost his Gift of the Gab, because, unknown to him,something very bad has occurred: somewhere, somehow, the well-spring of all stories is slowly being contaminated. Khattam-Shud-the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech-has secretly set out to pollute the very Sea of Stories itself.

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the center of The Satanic Verses controversy, with protests from Muslims in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, with Rushdie facing death threats and a fatw? issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, in February 1989.

He was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to literature" in June 2007. He holds the rank Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. He began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in 2007.In May 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest novel is The Enchantress of Florence, published in June 2008.