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 lifeRushdie 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.
