Salman Rushdie on his new novel, the Indian and Arab tales that inspired it, and the constant battle against fundamentalism

On the 21st floor of a building near Central Park, New York, a corridor of closed doors and discreet nameplates leads to that literary holy of holies, the Wylie Agency. Known in the book trade as “the Jackal” because of his business tactics, Andrew Wylie’s clients include the gilded living such as Martin Amis, Dave Eggers and Milan Kundera, and the illustrious dead, among them Norman Mailer, John Updike and Saul Bellow.

When the electronic latch clicks open for admission, the atmosphere inside is so hushed, I whisper my intention – an appointment with the agency’s most refulgent star of all: Salman Rushdie. The receptionist whispers back, in a manner that suggests I may have got the time, date, place or perhaps even the person, wrong.

Within moments, Rushdie, equally punctual, arrives and breaks the spell. He is affable and warm in greeting. His striped linen shirt, cotton trousers, white socks and trainers avoid any hint of fashion except of the engagingly crumpled variety. We have met before, in London when Rushdie was still living under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa (prompted by Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses), with no known address, bodyguards at his side, forced to travel in armoured cars. For the past 15 years he has lived in New York. His 12th novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, was published round the world this month.

Set in the near future after a storm strikes New York, Two Years features a gravity-defying gardener named Geronimo, and Dunia, princess of the jinn. These pre-Islamic folklore creatures, the novel tells us, “are not noted for their family lives. (But they do have sex. They have it all the time.)” They tend to be amoral, sneaky, lustful, power-hungry and irreligious. Rushdie adds his own chuckling rubric: “We humans have everything else, but not endless sex. Even endless sex after a couple of millennia probably gets a little tedious.”

He has trawled a sea of Indian and Arabian wonder tales for this novel, such as the Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra, hauling all of it into a baroque and barnacled fantasy narrative. “The source material is a great storehouse of tales I grew up with, that made me fall in love with reading,” he says. “I thought: ‘This is the literary baggage I’ve carried around all my life, and now I’m putting my bags down. Let’s see what happens when I unpack them and those stories escape into this place.’”