Dazzling new short stories from Salman Rushdie that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities

If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.

‘Salman Rushdie is a genius’ A.M. Homes

Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy during national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor.

These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life.

Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

'Rushdie’s wry sense of mischief remains undimmed' Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

'One of the most important voices in contemporary literature' Independent

‘Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities’ The Times

The Eleventh Hour is a book of five stories about ageing and dying… It might sound bleak, but the writing is funny and frisky, full of pace and panache * Sunday Times *
Entertaining and winningly heartfelt * Daily Telegraph *
Compelling * London Standard *
The opener is a beauty – it’s good to be back in Rushdie’s charming, witty world * The Times *
At 78, Rushdie is still publishing impactful work; we can all doff our hats to one of the most important voices in contemporary literature * Independent *
The energy of Rushdie’s prose and imagination…are as unflagging here as they were in his last novel, Victory City * i *
Rushdie’s book characters tend to linger and stay in the reader’s mind long after the pages have been closed… his latest offering, The Eleventh Hour, is no different * UK Press Syndciation *
A luminous collection * Economist, *Books of the Year* *
The five short stories collected here feature the dead…yet Rushdie’s wry sense of mischief remains undimmed * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* *
The Eleventh Hour reminded me most of the beautiful ending of The Satanic Verses… about “how newness enters the world”. Now, for all of us children of Rushdie, is a moving book about how oldness leaves it * New Statesman *

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. 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.