#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • Named a Best Book of 2024 by The Globe and Mail • The New York Times • NPR • Kirkus • The New Yorker • The Guardian • The Times

“Candid, plain-spoken, and gripping. . . . Humane and often witty. . . . Humour bubbles up organically from pain. . . . Knife is a clarifying book. . . . It reminds us of the things worth fighting for. . . . I put this book down only once or twice, to wipe off the sweat.” —New York Times Book Review

“This year’s best books mattered because they offered refuge from the wheels grinding in our heads. They made us feel less alone and reminded us that we are still sane. . . . Knife . . . is harrowing from front to back. But for Rushdie, humor bubbled up organically from pain—his book is packed with wit.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times, “Our Book Critics on Their Year in Reading”

“Knife isn’t so much about pondering imminent death than it is an affirmation—an insistence—on returning to life.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Rushdie’s triumph is not to be other: despite his terrible injuries and the threat he still lives under, he remains incorrigibly himself, as passionate as ever about art and free speech.” —The Guardian

“The subject—the idea for which Rushdie nearly died—is the freedom to say what he wants. . . . Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back.” —The Atlantic

“A brave and beautiful book that tells his story with a cathartic relish, no gruesome detail spared. . . . [Knife] is as much a love letter to his wife—the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths—as it is a punch-back at his assailant.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A masterpiece. . . . Knife is a tour-de-force, in which the great novelist takes his brutal near-murder and spins it into a majestic essay on art, pain and love. . . . Full of Rushdie’s wit, his wisdom, his stoicism, his optimism, his love of all culture from the so-called ‘high’ to the so-called ‘low’. . . . [Rushdie] has proved himself adept at describing miracles.” —Daily Telegraph

“Knife is in part about—and in some sense itself is—a battle between the two most prominent Rushdies: Great Writer and Great Man, artist and advocate, private person and public figure. . . . [It] contains some of the most precise, chilling prose of his career.” —Vulture

“It is hard to think of a contemporary novelist of English prose who has faced such an extreme and public ordeal and has lived to put the tale into language, language that performs that miraculous, triumphant trick of making you feel what it must be like to be someone else. . . . Knife is a rich, immersive, feisty account of his journey through darkness back to the light. Part thriller, part love story, part celebration of literature, it’s an incandescent book full of hair-raising descriptions of hard-won survival and beautiful, philosophical passages about art, freedom and resilience. . . . Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities—and he has paid a tremendous price for it. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude.” —The Times

“Knife is a visceral, intimate book.” —The New York Times

“Extraordinary. . . . The writing is as good as it has ever been. . . . [Knife] is a courageous defence of free speech.” —The Guardian

“Life-affirming. . . . It is hard to imagine a book more visceral, personal, vulnerable. . . . Rushdie pours himself, heart and soul, onto the page. . . . He uses his art, a tool he wields with customary power and precision, to blunt the impact of the blade that almost ended his life. . . . [Knife] is a deep reflection on the transience of happiness, and the fragility of life. . . . It is a celebration of the power—and necessity—of art as the medium through which we can, and must, make sense of the world and fight back against the worst of human nature. . . . [A] clarion call of defiance.” ­—The New Statesman

“The work of a supreme storyteller.” —The Sydney Morning Herald

“Strange and wonderful. . . . Precise and harrowing. . . . [Knife] answers violence with art, and explores the limits of the imagination.” —The New Republic

“Gripping. . . . A surprisingly tender and redemptive story. . . . Among the supporting cast in Knife is the knife itself—at once a cold, sharp object and a metaphor for hatred, fanaticism and life’s ruptures. . . . Triumphantly, [Rushdie] has risen again.” —The Economist

“Knife is not just a candid and fearless book but—against all odds—a defiantly witty one. . . . [Rushdie] has published this fizzing, galloping memoir. It has pace, drive, urgency—along with surprise doses of comedy, tenderness and wonder. . . . A ‘reckoning,’ if not quite a catharsis, [Knife is] Rushdie’s invigorating dispatch from (almost) the far side of death’s door.” —Financial Times

“Although the account of his violent ordeal is dramatic . . . the book is also a nuanced meditation on life, death, the importance of art, and the chilling daily reality of violence. . . . The book is perceptive and full of drollery, and perhaps masks that this is still a profoundly wounded man trying to work through his own PTSD. . . . The knife assault and his recovery offer a stark reminder of both the best and the worst of human nature, and the book fulfils his aim to take charge of what happened on that terrible day and ‘to answer violence with art.’” —The Independent

“At one point [Rushdie] quotes Martin Amis: ‘When you publish a book, you either get away with it, or you don’t.’ He has more than got away with this one. It’s scary but heartwarming, a story of hatred defeated by love. There’s even room for a few jokes.” —The Guardian

“This is a brave book by a brave man. Bravo, Salman Rushdie.” —Evening Standard

“A bright and rousing book about how [Rushdie] dealt with the cruel cuts and, quite miraculously, stitched his body and his life together again. . . . [Knife is] a positive, life-affirming work and, as one may have expected, the story about the attack, the trauma, and the recovery is dotted by delightful digressions [and] strewn with literary references. . . . Gripping.” —The Hindu

“A writer in full command of his talent. . . . Rushdie addresses his attack with emotional elegance.” —Houston Chronicle

“A graceful meditation on life and death that captures Rushdie at his most observant and lyrical.” —Kirkus

“Knife is testament to Rushdie’s convictions and to the sustaining power of love as he focuses on the suffering and support of his family and his wife, writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, during this ordeal . . . every electrifying page elicits tears and awe.” —Booklist

“[An] erudite and moving memoir. . . . A love letter to literature.” —The Times

“Knife is as streamlined and steely as its dreadful namesake. . . . [Rushdie’s] unflinching account of the raw physical experience of violence and recovery is what makes this memoir indelible.” —Slate