Blurring the lines between fantasy and magic realism, Salman Rushdie's brand new novel attempts a reconciliation of the human and the supernatural, the orient and the west and faith and reason.
Primarily set in New York in the United States of America, "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" revolves around Dunia, a female jinnia (genie), popularly believed to be creatures made of smokeless fire.
Spanning over a period of two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, the author weaves stories within stories as he narrates Dunia's amorous affair with a mortal man named Ibn Rushd who later abandons her and the consequences that follow the birth of innumerable children out of the seemingly impossible liaison.
"This is the the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn, known as the Lightning Princess on account of her mastery over the thunder bolt, who loved a mortal man long ago... And of her return to the world... And then go to war.
"It is also the tale of many other jinn...And of the time of crisis, the time-out-of-joint which we call the time of strangenesses, which lasted for one thousand nights and one night more," the Booker Prize winner writes.
Following a long wait for Ibn Rushd, a philosopher unaware of her supernatural form, to return after he abandons her, Dunia slips through a slit between the two worlds, into Peristan or Fairyland.
Her brood, referred to as the Duniazat, continued to thrive, and as time passed by, they scattered across continents gradually losing track of their own origin and forgetting one another's identities and eventually existence.
The only characteristic that was proof of their jinn descendancy was missing earlobes, and when Dunia returns to the mortal world, she searches out the earmarked descendants of her scattered tribe to "plant in their minds the knowledge of who they were.
