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Indian-born British and American novelist Salman Rushdie's new collection of stories is set to be published later this year, the first new fiction since he was stabbed in 2022, his publisher Penguin Random House India announced on Thursday.
"The Eleventh Hour" comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US, moving between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left. Rushdie said, "The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last twelve months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind - mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America." "And Goya and Kafka and Bosch as well," he added. The book is slated for a global release on November 4, 2025 and will be published under the Hamish Hamilton imprint in India. All rights were acquired from Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency. In one story two quarrelsome old men in Chennai experience personal tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Another story revisits the Bombay neighbourhood of 'Midnight's Children', a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In a third story set in an English college, an undead academic can't rest until he exacts vengeance upon 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 said. "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," he said. Following his 'Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder', Rushdie's new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left according to his publisher. "In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face. How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the eleventh hour, the final stage of your life? How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home?" Rushdie has authored 16 novels, including 'Midnight's Children' (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), 'The Satanic Verses', and 'Quichotte' (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). The celebrated author had been scheduled to give a talk on August 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. However, just before his talk, a man in dark clothing and a face mask went onto the stage and stabbed Rushdie multiple times. He suffered three stab wounds to his neck, four to his stomach, puncture wounds to his right eye and chest, and a cut on his right thigh. Rushdie was also blinded in the eye and the attack also affected the use of one of his hands. Soon after the attack, he was rushed to a hospital in northwestern Pennsylvania and underwent surgery. He also suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye. In February this year a jury in western New York convicted Hadi Matar, a 27-year-old from New Jersey, of attempted murder. The verdict came after testimony from Rushdie, who said he had been struck by his attacker's dark, ferocious eyes. Rushdie described initially feeling as though he was being punched, but soon realised he had "a very large quantity of blood pouring out" onto his clothes. Matar was also convicted of assault for injuring Ralph Henry Reese, a co-founder of a programme that provides refuge for writers, who was on stage to moderate the event. Matar is set to be sentenced on April 23 and faces up to 32 years in prison, in addition to federal terrorism-related charges, The New York Times had reported. (ANI)
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