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    Exclusive: Here’s The Cover Of Salman Rushdie’s New Book

    An exclusive look at the cover of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which will hit shelves September 2015.

    Salman Rushdie, the critically acclaimed author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, has an eleventh novel coming out this September titled Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

    The book will be Rushdie's first novel for adults in seven years, and was inspired by traditional Eastern "wonder tales."


    Inspired by the traditional "wonder tales" of the East, Salman Rushdie's novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today's world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.

    Rushdie's publisher, Penguin Random House, provided BuzzFeed with the book's cover and Rushdie's thoughts about it:

    It's a strong cover, I think: it finds a way of presenting a long title that makes it look light and easy, and as for the cloud and the thunderbolt, the novel is full of sorcery born of smoke and lightning. As for the human figure… can it be that his feet aren't touching the ground?

    Set in New York City, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a tale of magic realism that follows the children of Dunia, a princess of the jinn.


    In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor's office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.

    Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.

    Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia's children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, where beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

    September can't come quickly enough!

    Rushdie's new book is called Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. A previous version of this post mixed up days and years — we've never been good with calendars.