At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Their epic romance is narrated by ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, the photographer Rai. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. This is Salman Rushdie's boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, and account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus.