The Eleventh Hour
A Quintet of Stories
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker • Financial Times • The Guardian
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 uses 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 exact revenge upon the tormentor of his life. "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 ends of our own stories? 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rushdie follows his memoir Knife with a marvelous story collection focused on themes of legacy and death. Three novella-length entries are bookended by two shorter works that previously appeared in the New Yorker: "In the South," which centers on two 81-year-old men in southeastern India as they make their weekly trek to the post office to cash their pension slips, and "The Old Man in the Piazza," about an elderly man whose success at solving disputes earns him a reputation for having "the wisdom of Solomon." The longer works include the superb "Late," which traces the afterlife of a British academic whose ghost can communicate with one of his students. The smart and cryptic "Oklahoma" is framed as an unfinished autofiction by a dead writer, portraying his disappearance and presumed death and containing clues that suggest he might still be alive. The author draws on magic in "The Musician of Kahani," a story of wealth and power, about a pregnant musical prodigy who hones her supernatural skills to enact revenge on her exploitive in-laws. Throughout, Rushdie entertains with discursive references to art and cinema, as when the narrator of "Kahani" apologizes to the reader for failing to provide the "twists, complications, danger" of popular Hindi rom-coms. Grounded in moving ruminations on the afterlife and what a person leaves behind, these stories sing.
