In this brilliantly focused and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the land, and the poetry of Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie brings to the forefront the palpable human facts of a country in the midst of a revolution.

Rushdie went to Nicaragua in 1986, harboring no preconceptions of what he might find. What he discovered was overwhelming: a culture of heroes who had turned into inanimate objects and of politicians and warriors who were poets; a land of difficult, often beautiful contradictions. His perceptions always heightened by his special sensitivity to "the views from underneath," Rushdie reveals a land resounding with the clashes between history and morality, government and individuals.