Salman Rushdie’s Upcoming Book Explores Chennai, Mumbai, Mortality

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

NEW DELHI (ANI)- Salman Rushdie’s new collection of stories, The Eleventh Hour, will be published later this year—his first work of fiction since surviving a brutal stabbing in 2022, publisher Penguin Random House India said.

The book, slated for a global release on November 4, under the Hamish Hamilton imprint, comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England, and the US. The stories reflect themes and places deeply personal to Rushdie, including mortality, farewells, and his memories of Bombay, Cambridge, and America.

“In this volume, all written in the past year, I explore themes and places that have been much on my mind—mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, and America,” Rushdie said. “And Goya, Kafka, and Bosch as well.”

One story follows two quarrelsome old men in Chennai facing personal tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Another revisits the Bombay neighborhood of Midnight’s Children, where a magical musician is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a billionaire. A third, set in an English college, tells of an undead academic seeking vengeance against his former tormentor.

Rushdie views the five stories as a single, interconnected work. “Despite their differences in setting, story, and technique, they remain in conversation with one another,” he said.

The collection follows Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which Rushdie reflected on the 2022 attack that nearly took his life. He was stabbed multiple times on August 12, 2022, just before a scheduled talk at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. The attack left him blind in one eye and with severe injuries to his neck, chest, liver, and hand.

Rushdie, the author of 16 novels, is best known for Midnight’s Children (which won the Booker Prize and Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (shortlisted for the Booker Prize). His latest work continues to explore the places and themes that have shaped his life and literature.