Joseph Anton. A Memoir

From the author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children, which was awarded the Best of the Booker Prize in 1993, 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. It is shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize.