Rushdie's The MooR's LasT sigh as a family chronicle

The Moor's Last Sigh is Rushdie's second Post-Fatwa novel and one that he considers to be his best literary effort yet. “The Moor's Last Sigh is a picaresque recounting of the rise, decline and plunge to extinction of a Portuguese merchant family anciently established in southern India, focusing on the period from 1900 to the present.” (Rushdie)

The novel's narrator Moraes Zogoiby, writing, like Rushdie himself, under a death warrant, is the descendant of Catholics and Jews born in Bombay. The “Moor” traces his ancestry back to Boabdil, the Moorish leader who surrendered the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, the year that saw both the Reconquista from the Moors and the expulsion of Jews from Spain.