The Eleventh Hour
By (Author) Salman Rushdie
Vintage Publishing
Jonathan Cape Ltd
4th November 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Metaphysical / philosophical fiction
Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss
Narrative theme: Interior life
Narrative theme: Social issues
Paperback
240
Width 135mm, Height 216mm, Spine 20mm
300g
Dazzling new short stories from Salman Rushdie that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities, in his first new fiction since Victory City If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour. Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can't rest until he avenges his former tormentor. Following Knife- Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie's new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left. In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face. How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the eleventh hour, the final stage of your life How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home The Eleventh Hour is the magisterial new work from one of our greatest living writers. It speaks deeply to what Salman Rushdie has come from and through, and strikes into the heart of our fractious times.
Salman Rushdie is the author of sixteen novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.