Salman Rushdie says the idea of setting his latest novel between two historic U.S. elections came to him late, but the contrast between Barack Obama and Donald Trump's presidencies provided the perfect backdrop for his modern American fable. "I knew I was going to try to write a fairly contemporary social novel about this particular moment; but to actually have that structure going across those eight years was not there at the beginning," the celebrated author said in a phone interview from New York.