"The Golden House" by Salman Rushdie

 "On the day of the new president's inauguration, when we worried that he might be murdered as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crowds, and when so many of us were close to economic ruin in the aftermath of the bursting of the mortgage bubble, and when Isis was still an Egyptian mother-goddess, an uncrowned seventy-something king from a faraway country arrived in New York City with his three motherless sons to take possession of the palace of his exile, behaving as if nothing was wrong with the country or the world or his own story."

  This is the first sentence of "The Golden House"- long and convoluted but it really introduces the novel beautifully.  And lets you know that the sentences will be long and convoluted.
  And so, this "uncrowned seventy-something king from a faraway country" is the focus of this novel- along with his three motherless sons.
  The novel is full of foreshadowing- mostly sinister comments at the end of a chapter.

Charles Dickens

   The story is told through the eyes of Renee, a neighbour who is using this family as a subject for his next movie.
  What I learned about Rushdie's writing:
He can write fabulous sentences!
He lapses into 'stream of consciousness' and loves to go on tangents about fable, myth, and movies. 
His favourite author is Charles Dickens, who captured his own time and place- England 1800's, with exquisite detail. Rushdie aspired to do the same thing for New York from 2008 to 2016.  For these reasons, I found the book fascinating and challenging.
And here is a photo of Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature)