Press

What the critics say

Joseph Anton is a book that makes you laugh. It makes you sympathise. It may even scare you. It should also make you — if you believe that freedom is essential — very, very angry.
- The Times

[I]t may be the most important book of our times – comparable, in a sense, to Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man.
- Spectator

Joseph Anton demonstrates Mr. Rushdie's ability as a stylist and storyteller... Defenders of Enlightenment values, regardless of what they think of Mr. Rushdie the novelist, must acknowledge the fact that, when threatened, Salman Rushdie—Joseph Anton—reacted with great bravery and even heroism.
- Wall Street Journal

Funny, painfully moving and absolutely necessary to read.
- Daily Telegraph

Started Joseph Anton last night and got annoyed that I eventually had to interrupt it by sleeping. Reads like a thriller... going back in...
- Twitter

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

Written in the third person – the author is always “he”. This turns out to be a good decision: experience is kept at a novelistic distance;...Rushdie is able to write with remarkable frankness about highly intimate things.
- Irish Times

Frank and…more gripping than any spy story…the prose makes for powerful reading... He is a great writer who has been brave.
- Observer

Joseph Anton...reminds us of his fecund gift for language and his talent for explicating the psychological complexities of family and identity... [A] harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie’s work throughout his career.
- New York Times

Though Rushdie is a very serious literary novelist, he holds his own with Jon Stewart and proves that he's actually kind of a funny guy.
- Huffington Post

Joseph Anton conveys a clear and shaming picture of his ordeal… The reader is fully on Rushdie’s side.
- Guardian

A frank and zestful memoir...a precious historical document and an immersive page-turning read...pacey, intimate, surreal, whipped along by love and scorn and overflowing with tall tales...it exerts a mesmeric hold with high-octane storytelling.
- Independent

The book speaks to the heart, and to conscience.
- Financial Times

An indispensable text that needs no description.
- New Statesman

The most gripping, moving and entertaining literary memoir I have ever read.
- Independent on Sunday

The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping.
- New Statesman

A magnificent new memoir.
- Evening Standard

This moving, sometimes irritating, often beautiful and blissfully funny memoir is also a resounding manifesto, reminding us that novelists have a right and duty to tackle the most controversial subjects.
- Sunday Express

His big, bold, controversial memoir…matches Rushdie’s confident personality.
- The Times

[A book that] rattles with the terror of the moment.
- Barnes & Noble Review

The big book of the week was Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton
- Guardian

It’s an extraordinary document.
- Metro

Rushdie says art outlasts persecution, but artists may not. A look at how this dichotomy has played out in his life.
- Live Mint

Joseph Anton is as riveting for the small vignettes as the big, historical sweep.
- Financial Times

Reads like a thriller...painfully true.
- Observer

He is compelling here...grippingly reconstructing his long years in hiding.
- Sunday Times

[N]ot many Americans had heard of Rushdie until Valentines Day, 1989, when the dying Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran issued the infamous fatwa calling for Rushdie’s head... Rushdie spent most of the next decade in hiding, accompanied by armed British agents. He’s now published his account of that stranger-than-fiction time: Joseph Anton: A Memoir.
- Studio 360

Aside from the vivid, splendidly told account of his childhood and family background, Rushdie's book charts in, fascinating, grimly humourous detail, the shadowy half-life he lived until that fatwah was lifted on March 27, 2002.
- RTE Ten

Funny and painful.
- Daily Telegraph

An honest and lyrical memoir that is quite fascinating.
- The Economist

What most strikes me about the book are the fierce determination with which he fought to regain control of his life and the bracing wit that kept his feet firmly anchored on the ground.
- Washington Post

A page-turner.
- Independent

A transfixing account of nine years spent in hiding, at once overtly political and deeply personal.Religion and secularism, truth and falsity, friendship and enmity, hope and despair, bravery and cowardice, love and betrayal collide in the pages to form a highly charged battleground of ideas about a world poised for an uncertain future.
- The Hindu

An honest and remarkable memoir. Joseph Anton is an extraordinary account of the author's life, full of extreme highs and intense lows... Salman Rushdie's memoir 'Joseph Anton' has truly been one of the most awaited autobiographies of the year and will make for a priceless read in the years to come.
- Times of India

A fine book, honest and clever.
- Business Standard

As combustible and expansive as a vintage Russian novel.
- India Today

An important and necessary book which artfully bears the burden of many histories.Written in the third person as if it were a novel, the book is many other books too: a testament of survival, a political statement about freedom of expression; a gossipnama; and an archive of what may, in retrospect, turn out to be a crucial moment in the tangled history of East and West....Joseph Anton announces that Rushdie, man and writer, survives, thrives and continues to surprise.
- Sunday Guardian

Beautifully crafted...personal and political histories come together in a wonderfully lively way.
- People

Joseph Anton is a masterpiece...Salman Rushdie scales a new zenith of sublime brilliance which casts a spell on the reader.
- Sahara Time

Will engage, shock and illuminate the reader into the mind and life of one of contemporary English literature’s most consummate storytellers.
- Mid Day

A great read, wise and often aphoristic (in the best sense of the word).
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Critics have focused on Rushdie’s celebrity life..but to read Joseph Anton only through that lens is to miss the best: Rushdie’s impassioned arguments for the freedom of people to write, read, think and chose for themselves.
- Nilanjana Roy

A riveting read for all. I cannot recommend it enough. All of its six hundred and thirty three pages.
- IBN Live

Like the memoir's third-person point of view, the alias title lends disassociation and discomfort to all its pages, subtly and brilliantly reflecting Rushdie's state of mind during those years in hiding. . . . Rushdie's remarkable memoir, as any memoir, is one version of the truth. But it is a thoughtful and astute version, a narrative so rich that if it were fiction, it would win fiction awards … if only it were fiction. This is an important book not only because of what it has to say about a man of principle who, under the threat of violence and death, stood firm for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also because of its implications about our times and fanatical religious intolerance in a frighteningly fragile world.
- USA TODAY

A gripping, firsthand account of an important battle for artistic freedom.
- Los Angeles Times

[R]iveting. . . . In 10 dramatic chapters, Joseph Anton captures the career of a fallible writer who struggled to sustain the fragile life of the imagination.
- San Francisco Chronicle

Gripping and, weirdly, often hilarious . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between such moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing — at all costs — any curtailment on a writer’s freedom to say what he or she wants.
- Boston Globe

Aspects of a spy novel, a writer’s autobiography and a victim’s affidavit pulsing with resentment and fear combine to reveal a man’s dawning awareness of the primacy of freedom.
- Kirkus

Rushdie accomplishes many wondrous and momentous feats in this profound and galvanizing memoir…. A unique, intimate, and resounding memoir elucidating what literature does for us and why artistic and intellectual freedoms truly are matters of life and death.
- Booklist

Rushdie’s memoir is many books in one book. It’s a personal story that takes place at the
center of an international crisis. . . . It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man that describes his influences,obsessions and ambitions. . . .It’s a record of his relocation from Bombay to London to New York. . . . It’s an intimate tale of fathers and sons, of the beginnings and ends of marriages, of friendships and betrayals. At the same time, Joseph Anton is a large-scale spectacle of political and cultural conflicts. . . . of the continuing struggle between religious belief in the immutable word of God on one hand and secular faith in the unconditional right of free speech on the other.
- New York Times Book Review

Rushdie has written in Joseph Anton an engrossing memoir in the third person that shows all his virtues as a novelist.
- Mail and Guardian

The third person voice adds another veil of objectivity to what is a deeply personal, passionate memoir.
- Business Day