At 633 pages this memoir is not a light nor superficial read. Joseph Anton A Memoir will certainly give you an insight into how Rushdie, living under his chosen name of Joseph Anton for nine years, lived (or didn't live) his life. I must confess to knowing that a fatwa had been placed on Salman Rushdie (as a consequence of opposition against the perceived blasphemous content of his book The Satanic Verses) but I had given very little thought at the time or in the intervening years to what this meant for Rushdie's life and his day to day ability to go about his affairs. I believe that Salman Rushdie is one of the great literary geniuses of our time and he is certainly one of my favourite and most esteemed authors. This Review: 10/10 Value for Money: Interesting Facts: Accuracy: Personal Choice: Salman Rushdie is the author of ten novels, one collection of short stories, three works of non-fiction, and the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day. It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers and of how he regained his freedom. In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells his story for the first time the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech.

He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov - Joseph Anton. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being 'against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran'. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. On 14 February 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been 'sentenced to death' by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Available: 21 September 2012 Joseph Anton: a Memoir product reviews

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Rushdie memoir