This is not your usual kind of Salman Rushdie book. There are magic potions, conjurers, big stone frogs, gates onto other worlds and a fair few nutcases. The main character, an American Indian granted immortality and now wanting to get his death back, is kind of boring. The people he meets, especially Virgil, are mildly more interesting, but the book only really gets going around the middle section, when our hero, Flapping Eagle, is in the town and involved with other people. When he's struggling through various parallel dimensions in a bid to get to the all-powerful Grimus and argue his case for mortality, it gets bizarre and arbitrary and I turn off. But then, I'm not a sci-fi fan so it had its work cut out from the start.