Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, a mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, an ageing traveling salesman obsessed with the “unreal real” of TV, who falls in impossible love with a queen of the screen and sets off to drive across America on a quest to prove himself worthy of her hand.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie’s Quichotte is also the story of a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse, the “Age of Anything Can Happen,” dealing with father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, racism, the opioid crisis, cyber-spies, science fiction, and the end of the world. The lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and an entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Rushdie is the Booker Prize–winning and bestselling author of numerous novels and works of nonfiction including Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Golden House, and Joseph Anton. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature. In conversation with Dolen Perkins-Valdez, an associate professor of literature at American University and the author of the novels Wench and Balm. Book signing to follow.