Book description
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. 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
over 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.
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels, one collection of
short stories, three works of non-fiction, and the co-editor of
The
Vintage Book of Indian Writing
. In 2008
Midnight's Children
was judged to be the Best of the Booker, the best novel to have won the
Booker Prize in its forty year history.
The Moor's Last Sigh
won the Whitbread Prize in 1995 and the European Union's Aristeion
Prize for Literature in 1996. He is a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres
and in 2007 was knighted for his services to literature.
