Adam Mars Jones

In Salman Rushdie’s uneasy new novel, 55-year-old Malik Solanka, "retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker", takes refuge in New York after leaving his wife and three-year-old son in London. The United States for once, though, is not seen primarily as a place of second chances, of beginning again, even if in the course of the book Solanka is re-energised and reconciled to his past.