Salman Rushdie's 'Knife' is unflinching about his brutal stabbing and uncanny in its vital spirit

British-US author Salman Rushdie's new book 'Knife' on sale at a bookstore in New York, on April 16, 2024. — Photo: ANGELA WEISS/AFP

In Salman Rushdie's first book since the 2022 stabbing that hospitalised him and left him blind in one eye, the author wastes no time reliving the day he thought might be his last.

"At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm,” Rushdie writes in the opening paragraph of the memoir Knife, published Tuesday.