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Salman Rushdie will publish a new collection of stories later this year, the first work of fiction he has written since he was attacked in 2022.
The Eleventh Hour comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US, all places Rushdie has lived.
“The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last 12 months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind – mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America”, said Rushdie. “And Goya and Kafka and Bosch as well.”
In one story, two men in Chennai, India, face personal tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Another story revisits the Bombay neighbourhood of Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, where a magical musician is unhappily married to a billionaire. A third story, set in an English college, sees an undead academic unable to rest until he gets revenge against his former tormentor.
“I’m happy that the stories, very different from one another in setting, story and technique, nevertheless manage to be in conversation with one another, and with the two stories that serve as prologue and epilogue to this threesome,” Rushdie added. “I have come to think of the quintet as a single work, and I hope readers may see and enjoy it in the same way.”
The book “moves between the places [Rushdie] has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left”, according to Rushdie’s publisher Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House. “In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face. How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the 11th hour, the final stage of your life? How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home?”
Rushdie announced that he was working on the forthcoming book last October to an audience at Lviv BookForum. All the novellas “in some way consider the idea of an ending”, he said at the time.
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The Eleventh Hour will be Rushdie’s first book since publishing Knife, an account of the 2022 attempt on his life, last year. His most recent work of fiction was Victory City, a novel published in 2023, which he completed before he was attacked on stage in New York.
Rushdie’s other novels include The Satanic Verses and Quichotte. Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker prize, the Booker of Bookers in 1994, marking the prize’s 25th anniversary, and the Best of the Booker in 2008, marking the award’s 40th anniversary. Rushdie previously published a collection of short stories in 1994 titled East, West.
