A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence. The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers. Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008 : Trying to describe a Salman Rushdie novel is like trying to describe music to someone who has never heard it--you can fumble with a plot summary but you won't be able to convey the wonder of his dazzling prose or the imaginative complexity of his vision. At its heart, The Enchantress of Florence is about the power of story--whether it is the imagined life of a Mughal queen, or the devastating secret held by a silver-tongued Florentine. Make no mistake, it is Rushdie who is the true "enchanter" of this story, conjuring readers into his gilded fairy tale from the very first sentence: "In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold." At once bawdy, gorgeous, gory, and hilarious, The Enchantress of Florence is a study in contradiction, highlighted in its barbarian philosopher-king who detests his bloodthirsty heritage even while he carries it out. Full of rich sentences running nearly the length of a page, Rushdie's 10th novel blends fact and fable into a challenging but satisfying read. --Daphne Durham The Washington Post sums up general sentiment: If one can overlook its flaws, The Enchantress of Florence is “so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.” Rushdie combines his trademark mix of fantasy and reality in his exploration of East and West, power, love, loyalty, religion, humanism, and imagination. While many critics described the writing as sensual, evocative, and dreamy, and the portraitsâ€"Niccolò Machiavelli, Savonarola, and the Medicisâ€"as intriguing, other reviewers were not so generous. A few faulted Rushdie’s mechanical storytelling, flat figures, over-the-top research, and self-indulgent digressions. But readers who focus on the wonder of the story rather than the particulars won’t be disappointed. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes: “Ideas and what we imagine have as much power over our lives as the tangible stuff, Rushdie seems to be telling us. They are both the basis of the modern world, this fable gently reminds, and its terrible bane.” Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. *Starred Review* Rushdie spins a tall tale based on the hoary premise of a stranger coming to town. Town in this instance is the capital city of the Mogul Empire of Akbar the Great—Rushdie chooses well in writing a historical novel centered on one of the most fascinating rulers in the history of  East Asia—and the stranger is a Florentine conjurer who has come all the way from Italy to seek an audience with the king of kings, for he has a story fit only for the emperor’s ears. The stranger, attractive on many levels—“He has picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague”—ingratiates himself into court life, having a keen admirer in the emperor himself.  Copious detail about the history of the Mogul and Ottoman Empires leads to reader edification but, at the same time, can lead to reader impatience; nevertheless, as always, Rushdie furnishes the world of his fiction in lush upholstery. He is uninterested in keeping his narrative tightly tethered to reality; the magical level it carries so robustly imbues it with the atmosphere of a fable. It’s an elaborate, complicated read, intensely reflective of the author’s worldliness, intelligence, and partiality to the fantastical. This novel is best sipped, because it’s a heady brew, but it is also entertainment of the highest literary order. --Brad Hooper “A romance of beauty and power from Italy to India . . . so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.” –Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World “This is ‘history’ jubilantly mixed with postmodernist magic realism.” –Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books “A