The story follows a neophyte indie film maker from a quiet multicultural neighborhood in New York City when a mysterious family, Nero "Golden" and his three adult sons, move into the Golden House and become the subject of his ten-year-long film project.

The story covers the cultural angst of the 2016 United States Presidential election campaign as well as looking backwards into the crime and film syndicates of Mumbai.

According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on twenty critic reviews, with nine being "rave" and four being "positive" and three being "mixed" and four being "pan".

[1][2] Writing for The Guardian, Aminatta Forna said: "Rushdie puts his finger on the nationwide identity crisis in this novel of race, reinvention and the different bubbles of US life.

The forecast: heavy wind";[4] while New Statesman reviewer Leo Robson dismissed it as "little more than an exercise in googling, an attempt to sell the listicle as literature.