It was Valentine’s Day but he hadn’t been getting on with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. The living room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. He put down the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. He wondered how many days he had left to live and thought the answer was probably a single- digit number. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London but the question shut out the light. She had called him at home on his private line without explaining how she got the number. What follows is an exclusive excerpt from the prologue to Joseph Anton.Īfterwards, when the world was exploding around him and the lethal blackbirds were massing on the climbing frame in the school playground, he felt annoyed with himself for forgetting the name of the BBC reporter, a woman, who had told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. He's also not afraid to throw darts - at politicians, Imams who were after his head, and even other writers (Margaret Atwood is targeted for some early criticism but manages to redeem herself later). Rushdie uses the memoir to pay back a heavily owed debt to loyal friends who protected him, including writers, agents, his Norwegian publisher William Nygaard who survived an assassination attempt, and the loyal police team with whom he lived for many years. In the early days of the crisis revealed in Joseph Anton - an alias he chose for police to identify him based on the names of his favourite authors - Rushdie led a bizarre existence in which he found himself defending his right to free speech to government leaders one minute and hiding for hours in his bathroom to avoid being seen by the cleaning lady the next. 14, 1989, for writing the book The Satanic Verses. In the prologue, the author describes how it felt when he first heard that he had been sentenced to death by a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the then Supreme Leader of Iran, on Feb. It’s an eerie echo of events recounted in Joseph Anton.

Hassan Sane’i, head of the Khordad Foundation, added $500,000 to a bounty, now totalling $3.3 million, on Rushdie’s life Monday in response to a U.S.-made film Innocence of Muslims, which has incited violence across the Muslim world. Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, an account of his decade-long fight to have a 1989 fatwa against his life lifted, arrives in stores Tuesday, the day after a renewed call for the author’s death reveals his battle is far from over.

Rushdie memoir