Shame is Salman Rushdie's third novel, published in 1983. It precedes his most famous and controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, which inspired Ayatollah Komeini, the then-leader of Iran, to issue a fatwa against him that called for his death. Like The Satanic Verses, the novel is concerned with Pakistani and Muslim life, postcolonial socio-political landscapes, and pushing novel conventions to their limits. Shame weaves a complex web between a set of characters who are all members of the elite in a postcolonial fictional country that is both implied and explicitly stated by the narrator to be an allegory for late 20th-century Pakistan.
Throughout the novel, Rushdie's narrator...
