Random House
September 2012
On Sale: September 18, 2012
656 pages ISBN: 0812992784 EAN: 9780812992786 Kindle: B007PFD90G Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
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. For the
first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have
written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused
of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.”
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. He was
asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by.
He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their
names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov—Joseph
Anton.
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 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.
It is a
book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling,
provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what
happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that
is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.
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