Shame

Salman Rushdie

$24.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Vintage Classics
24 February 2026

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic

Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar's mothers teach him to live a life without shame. And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal.

‘Shame is every bit as good as Midnight's Children. It is a pitch-black comedy of public life and historical imperatives’ The Times

By: Salman Rushdie
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 200g
ISBN: 9781784878931
ISBN 10: 1784878936
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 24 February 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Salman Rushdie is the author of sixteen novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.