In this highly readable memoir of being a journalist at the Vatican, John Thavis follows the conclaves, sex scandals, internal backstabbing and olympian nature of the popes with a sense of comic relief at the caravan passing through his viewfinder

One closes John Thavis' perceptive study reflecting on the Vatican's challenge: to persist in a secularizing world sometimes fascinated by the pomp and pageantry of St. Peter's-but often hostile or increasingly indifferent to the Church's determined mission to harmonize warring factions and bickering enemies, even if both are on the same Catholic side

Not only provocative, this report is illuminating and fully accessible to members of the faith and doubters alike

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

An intimate tale of fathers and sons, of the beginnings and ends of marriages, of friendships and betrayals. At the same time, Joseph Anton is a large-scale spectacle of political and cultural conflicts.

This is tense thriller even if we know the outcome

Absorbing… Rushdie is compelling here

Describes the painful process by which a human being becomes a symbol

Sprawling, intimate, surreal, it exerts a mesmeric hold

Poignant and honest

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

A frank and zestful memoir...a precious historical document and an immersive page-turning read...pacey, intimate, surreal, whipped along by love and scorn and overflowing with tall tales...it exerts a mesmeric hold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

The book speaks to the heart, and to conscience.

An indispensable text that needs no description.

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

The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping.

A magnificent new memoir.

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.

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

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

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

It’s an extraordinary document.

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

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

Reads like a thriller...painfully true.

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

[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.

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.