Eleventh Hour

Salman Rushdie

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About the book

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.

'More than 40 years after Midnight's Children, there is still nobody who spins a yarn quite like Salman Rushdie' Spectator

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

About the Author

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of fifteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages. In 2023, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.