The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a transitional book for Rushdie. In Midnight's Children, his narrator expressed the feeling that he was "floating in the amniotic fluid of the past." Rushdie's books since that time have dealt with his origins in and subsequent exile from the country of his birth, culminating in the probing, long-range account of the history of the subcontinent in The Moor's Last Sigh.

At this point in his writing life, Rushdie stated that he had the "feeling that I've done enough, if you like, or enough for the moment," and that he wanted to write about "the same movement that I've made—that's to say, migrate into the West." This is actually a continuation of one of his abiding concerns, the theme of trans-cultural migration as a prominent feature of late-twentieth-century life, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet emphasizes the hybrid...