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Joseph Anton

A Memoir


From the author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children comes an unflinchingly honest and fiercely funny account of a life turned upside-down.

On Valentine’s Day, 1989, Salman Rushdie received a telephone call from a BBC journalist that would change his life forever: Ayatollah Khomeini, a leading Muslim scholar, had issued him with a death sentence. This is his own account of how he was forced to live in hiding for over a decade; at once intimate and explosive, this is the personal tale behind the international story.

How does a man live with the constant threat of murder? How does he continue to work when deprived of his freedom? How does he sustain friendships, or fall in and out of love? How does he fight back? For over a decade, Salman Rushdie dwelt in a world of secrecy and disguise, a world of security guards and armoured cars, of aliases and code names.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie tells the remarkable story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech.

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize

Joseph Anton is a splendid book, the finest new memoir to cross my desk in many a year

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

About Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9780099563440
  • Length: 656 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 40mm x 130mm
  • Weight: 453g
  • Price: £12.99
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