The Eleventh Hour Hardcover by Salman Rushdie

Product Details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada (2025-11-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781039058538
• Item Weight: 396.9 grams
• Dimensions: 8.52 x 5.75 x 0.97 cm

From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie, an inventive collection of fiction that explores life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life

Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life’s final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work—India, England, and America—and feature an unforgettable cast of characters.

“In the South” introduces a pair of quarrelsome old men—Junior and Senior—and their private tragedy at a moment of national calamity. In “The Musician of Kahani,” a musical prodigy from the Mumbai neighborhood featured in Midnight’s Children uses her magical gifts to wreak devastation on the wealthy family she marries into. In “Late,” the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. “Oklahoma” plunges a young writer into a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. And “The Old Man in the Piazza” is a powerful parable for our times about freedom of speech.

Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? Do we spend our “eleventh hour” in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don’t know the end of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour probes life and death, legacy and identity, with wit, creativity, and keen insight.

About the Author

SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of fifteen novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Victory City, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a previous collection of stories, East, West; two memoirs, Joseph Anton and Knife; 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 has 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, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a former president of PEN America. His books have been translated into more than forty languages.