In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini — like an evil sorcerer in a fairy tale — condemned Salman Rushdie for heresy, essentially marking the writer for death wherever he was. Rushdie left his family and went into hiding, and reached out to his young son through a new book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Jonathan Mitchell has the tale of how that book and its plucky young hero wound up in an opera.
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