The Ground Beneath Her Feet

A mythic tale of love, celebrity, and seismic events—all set to a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack: “This is Rushdie at his absolute, almost insolently global best” (Toni Morrison).

When the famous singer Vina Apsara is caught in a devastating earthquake, she is never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music.

Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus’s childhood friend and Vina’s sometime lover, her “back-door man,” the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humor, and love, is perhaps the book’s true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own intimate truths.

Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to crack, revealing great abysses below the surfaces of things. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie’s most gripping novel, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy, high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. It is a tale of love, death, and rock ‘n’ roll.