The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. We hope they will introduce a number of new angles from which to examine Rushdie's fabulous and philosophic vision of his native India, a panorama condensed within the story of one family and its last surviving member, Moraes Zogoiby, known as "the Moor."

The Moor lives out a unique fate; he is doomed to go through his life at double-speed. Aged thirty-six, but with the physique of a seventy-two-year-old, he narrates the fantastic story of his life within a family who exemplify the glorious plurality of India: his mother, India's greatest artist, comes from a Portuguese line descended on the wrong side of the sheet from Vasco da Gama, while his father is one of the ancient community of Cochin Jews, and is also an illegitimate descendant--possibly--of Boabdil, the last Moorish Sultan of Granada, expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. Moraes, like his ancestor Boabdil, looks back at the end of his life upon his brilliant, ruined family and on the India he knew as a young man, a lost paradise of possibilities which has been squandered through the human sins of hatred, factionalism, and ethnic and religious intolerance.