Shame was Salman Rushdie's third novel. It is a short novel (300 pages). The theme of the novel is Pakistan. Rushdie wrote this after his Midnight's Children, whose theme was India.

Shame is a novel about Pakistan and about the people who ruled Pakistan. The basic idea was to portray the lives of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Zia-ul-Haq and their relationship. The more central theme is the violence that is born out of shame. There are characters that actually 'stand' for 'shame' and 'shamelessness' - Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam respectively. There is magical realism and there is the usual magical writing that characterises Rushdie's novels.