The big book of the week was Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton, which AN Wilson in the Sunday Telegraph described as "most peculiar". He didn't like it: "Literature's 'importance' gets overshadowed by a toxic sense of a writer's status as a celebrity ... as the narrative continues, this book conveys a bewildering emptiness … the memoir is inordinately long, and the drama of the fatwa … gets swamped by a sort of literary luvvie-dom." According to a more friendly John Lloyd in the Financial Times, "Scores are settled, but kindnesses and courage are recognised and there is a wealth of anecdote … Joseph Anton is overlong and too richly endowed with famed authors and starry events: Rushdie, as he writes, loves to be loved. But as a story of refusal to be cowed the books speaks to the heart, and to conscience." For Colin McCabe in the New Statesman, the "story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping. And there are moments … when he writes as well as he has ever done." In the Times David Aaronovitch wrote about Rushdie's enemies as appeasers: "There is an honour roll in Joseph Anton and on it are the names of people such as Michael Foot, Susan Sontag, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Gita Sahgal and Christopher Hitchens." But when it comes to "those non-Muslims who attacked Rushdie … you see the same arguments and psychology that would have justified collaboration with totalitarianism". Nicholas Shakespeare, in the Daily Telegraph, was alone in arguing that Rushdie's portrait of his second wife Marianne Wiggins "is a masterpiece … It is to Rushdie's infinite credit that he can be candid and searing about his weaknesses and destructive appetites". Shakespeare concluded that though "awfully long, solipsistic and of necessity self-serving, Joseph Anton is also funny, painfully moving and absolutely necessary to read." "He has harsh words for all his wives," pointed out Robert Harris in the Sunday Times, whose overall reaction was mixed: "Not the least of the many pleasures … is its revelation of what it is like suddenly to be locked inside a bulletproof cocoon." Yet the book "somehow diminishes him. For a writer who has insisted on the novelist's right to offend, he displays an extraordinary sensitivity to criticism … there is too much name-dropping … too much tedious boastfulness … and, occasionally, just too much information … whether it is the brilliance of genius that shines from him or merely the charisma of security-protected celebrity is a question this memoir leaves hanging."

Sebastian Faulks's A Possible Life "is divided into five sections," wrote Lucy Atkins in the Sunday Times, "each set in a different era and country with apparently no connection … It is structured like a book of short stories. It reads like a book of stories. But it is a novel. And the challenge, here, is to work out why." It isn't a "comfortable read. It stops and starts and throws up more questions than it answers. But in the end it does what any good novel should – it unsettles, it moves, and it forces us to question who we are." The Independent on Sunday's Doug Johnstone was decided: "Let's get the minor gripe out of the way at the start. This is not a novel." Yet though not a "happy book" it is "probably Faulks's most intriguing fictional offering". Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph concluded that the book is about "the chances and choices that shape the lives we have. It is the kind of large, portentous theme that could have produced a grandstanding novel. But Faulks addresses it with a finely observed humanity."