In this brilliantly focussed and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst o f revolution. Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986. What he discovered was overwhelming: a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions, of strange heroes and warrior-poets. Rushdie came to know an enormous ra nge of people, from the foreign minister - a priest - to the midwife w ho kept a pet cow in her living room. His perceptions always heightened by his sensitivity and his unique flair for language, in The Jaguar S mile, Rushdie brings us the true Nicaragua, where nothing is simple, e verything is contested, and life-or-death struggles are an everyday oc currence.

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.