I was lucky enough to see Salman Rushdie (via Zoom) at the Hay Festival in 2023 and bought a signed copy of his book Victory City in the festival bookshop and finally had some time to read it this July just before going on holiday.

It is set in fourteenth century southern India and tells the story of the city of Bisnaga over the two hundred and forty seven year lifetime of the goddess Pampa Kampana. It begins when Pampa is nine years old and watches everything she knows destroyed after an epic battle, and then her mother self-immolate, before she is inhabited by a goddess, and understandably retreats into silence for nine years to cope with all of that.

As one does, she gives her brothers a bag of seeds to sow and Victory City sprouts where they scatter them. Her steady leadership of the great city is eventually scuppered when the men seize control, which unsurprisingly leads to war after war.

This is very different from what I usually read, and although I have enjoyed many books by Rushdie is not something I would usually have picked up, but I found myself really enjoying it and sad to say goodbye to Pampa at the end.