The Flower Bearers: a ‘visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional destruction’

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s memoir opens in 2021, on the day of her wedding to Salman Rushdie. “I am marrying a man that some people have deemed dangerous,” she writes. “What harm could find us on such a day?” One might assume that these “overt intimations of tragedy” refer to the attack on Rushdie 11 months later, in which he was stabbed 15 times and lost sight in his right eye, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer. But “in fact, her account of the attack comes relatively late in the book, the...