It is written in the third person, a conceit that works well enough as a way of recounting the alienating experience of living under cover while hearing one's real name condemned by Muslim leaders world-wide. Joseph Anton is hardly a conventional memoir. 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. How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that 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 February 14, 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.

Novelist joseph anton