Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a novel for children by the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, published in 1990.

Haroun's father Rashid is a storyteller whose tales entertain an entire city, and his mother Soraya leaves the family for a neighbour who tells her that stories are a waste of time. Rashid's gift then fails him in front of an audience, and Haroun, blaming himself, sets out to repair it. He is carried to Kahani, a moon where the Ocean of the Streams of Story is fed by springs from every part of the world, and discovers that a rival kingdom is pumping poison into it and planning to silence stories altogether. Rushdie fills the book with talking creatures, a mechanical army of the night and puns in more than one language, and gives Haroun companions drawn from the life he left behind.

The novel was written for the author's son, and its argument about who gets to tell stories, and who would rather they stopped, is not concealed at all.