The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

An epic hallucination of a novel that somehow manages to blend a plot about modern life for immigrants in London with fables about angels, demons, miracles and revelations without diminishing either, asking big questions along the way about identity and morality. The opening section is dramatically supernatural, which I found a little alienating, but before long sincere observations were mingling with the magical farce, as with the description of the contents of a plane falling to earth, starting with the physical detritus but moving on to the "debris of the soul" of the migrants killed in the crash:

"broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home."

I was also struck by the explanation, in the middle of a plot about monstrous mutant immigrants attempting to escape police custody, of how the transformation has been imposed upon them: "They describe us... That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct."

The novel's central values are integrity - characters are tested with possible compromises of the truth, or 'easier' false identities - and mercy, as choices must be made about forgiveness or revenge. The way that these choices are handled as the story unfolds is gripping and thought-provoking.