The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie's first major publication after The Satanic Verses, was written in the shadow of the fatwa and in the wake of Rushdie's political exile from his former homeland. The novel appears to replicate the author's predicament by foregrounding a sense of banishment and impending death, opening and closing the eponymous Moor's narrative with his premature death in exile. Exile and death thus frame the rich narrative collage that constitutes this saga of the Catholic-Jewish Da-Gama-Zogoiby family, containing the events in a foreclosed temporal register that offers both cultural and historical density to the text. The Moor's retrospective narration 're-covers' - simultaneously reclaims and layers - four generations of family history drawing intricate connections between fiction and history by drawing on the trope of the palimpsest - a writing surface upon which the original traces have been overwritten. This trope - which I explore in depth later - is central to the model of historiography as re-covery in the text and reflects the contingency of historical narration, its production within a specific historical moment. Indeed, this novel is one of Rushdie's most 'readerly' texts in that its prime concern, as Stephen Baker has pointed out, is 'the rediscovery of a creative, historical dimension in the reading process itself'. It is appropriate therefore to begin by applying these terms to our own reading of the text: to reflect upon its own moment of production as part of our engagement with a 'palimpsestic', or multilayered, reading of the novel.