Sir Salman Rushdie has received many awards for his writing, including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the `Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours.
It's one of the most vivid and convincing portraits of contemporary America I've read. -- Alex Preston * Observer, Book of the Year * [A] complex and witty fable ... Rushdie has always been an impish myth-manipulator, refusing to accept, as in this novel, that the lives of the emperors can't be blended with film noir, popular culture and crime caper. On the evidence of The Golden House, he is quite right. -- Alex Clark * Observer * Unruly but exuberant... Much of the success of The Golden House, in fact, lies in its humour and in the vigour of its storytelling... There is a glowing energy to the prose that makes this Rushdie's most enjoyable, mischievous and American of novels. -- Arifa Akbar * Financial Times * Intelligent and darkly funny...with a raw political edge. -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst * The Times * Rushdie writes with a Dickensian exuberance, always full of humour as well as striking scornful, tragic notes. Often he plays the role of satirist. His caricatures and outsize figures are full of life, wickedness and human energy: again, as in Dickens, grounded in a precise social and political scene. -- Jereme Boyd Maunsell * Evening Standard *