Haroun

Haroun's father is the famed storyteller Rashid Khalifa, the Ocean of Notions or the Shah of Blah, but his wife tires of his imagination and elopes with Mr. Sengupta, a dull and dreary clerical drone. This leaves Rashid heartbroken, and unable to continue his profession of storytelling. Haroun feels he started the problem (by asking his father "What's the point of telling stories that aren't even true?") so he must fix it and help his father. Soon, however, Haroun discovers that Rashid has already canceled his subscription to the magical story waters of Kahani, which give all storytellers their imagination, and in order to reverse the cancellation Haroun must go to Kahani. Thus Haroun embarks on a mystical journey to Kahani (meaning "story" in Urdu), a hidden moon of the Earth, in a quest to restore his father's gift of the gab.

On Kahani, stories are everywhere, they make up the ocean (which gives the book its title). However, the evil Khattam-Shud (whose name means "The End", "completely finished") is attempting to poison the sea of stories and render the inhabitants of Kahani silent by plugging the spring of stories (where all stories come from). He has also started a war with Gup, the central city where stories are made, by kidnapping the king's daughter, Princess Batcheat, angering her fiance Prince Bolo (in a reversal of the traditional prince-princess story myth, Batcheat is incredibly ugly and a terrible singer, while Bolo is a hyperactive idiot and implied to be cowardly). Haroun, along with various interesting characters such as Iff the water-genie, Butt the mechanical hoopoe, the eggheads at the P2C2E (Processes Too Complicated To Explain) House, Mali the floating gardener, and a pair of rhyming fish (Goopy and Bagha, named after the titular characters of a film by Satyajit Ray) set out to stop Khattam-Shud, thus saving Rashid, Batcheat, Kahani, and the stories of the world.