Joseph Anton

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

Pankaj Mishra, Guardian

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.

Michael C Moynihan, Wall Street Journal

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.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

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

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

A frank and zestful memoir...a precious historical document and an immersive page-turning read...pacey, intimate, surreal, whipped along by love and scorn and overflowing with tall tales...it exerts a mesmeric hold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

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

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

Margaret Drabble, Observer

The book speaks to the heart, and to conscience.

John Lloyd, Financial Times

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.

David Aaronovitch, The Times

A magnificent new memoir.

Matthew d’Ancona, Evening Standard

The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping.

Colin McCabe, New Statesman

Funny, painfully moving and absolutely necessary to read.

Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

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.

Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times

It’s an extraordinary document.

Anthony Cummins, Metro

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

Rod Liddle, Spectator

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

[A book that] rattles with the terror of the moment.

Graeme Wood, Barnes & Noble Review

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

Salil Tripathi, Live Mint

[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.

Kurt Andersen, Studio 360

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

Dylan Jones (Editor, GQ), Twitter

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

Guardian

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

Ginny Dougary, Financial Times

The most gripping, moving and entertaining literary memoir I have ever read.

Amanda Craig, Independent on Sunday

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.

Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express

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.

Paddy Kehoe, RTE Ten

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

Robert Collins, Sunday Times

An indispensable text that needs no description.

Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

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

Ian Finlayson, The Times

Reads like a thriller...painfully true.

Robert McCrum, Observer