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He said such shops were "magical", adding: "There's something about the presence of a record store."

What won her over was witnessing what she described as “the joy and creativity and play that was happening in these libraries – it was magical.”

For readers familiar with Sir Salman's Midnight's Children, for which he won the Booker Prize, this upcoming work revisits the Bombay neighbourhood of that book, where "a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire".

When she does some online art-history sleuthing, however, she learns that if indeed these magical beasts are real, then likely so are ancient depictions of them as fully capable of savagely fighting back when threatened.

This temporal blending, far from being a coldly experimental exercise, immerses us in the pure pleasure of storytelling, as light and free as those magical puppet shows Gomes occasionally returns to.