["9781787336056_1__1200x1200.jpg"]
The Eleventh Hour
Media Gallery
Extra Media
  • Published: 6 December 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787336049
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $55.00

The Eleventh Hour

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
4 Nov 2025
Hardback
6 Dec 2025
EBook
6 Nov 2025
Audiobook
4 Nov 2025
Pre-order from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Book Hero Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers
Media Gallery
Extra Media

Dazzling new short stories from Salman Rushdie that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities, in his first new fiction since Victory City

If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.

Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor.

These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through.

Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? How do we achieve fulfilment with our lives if we don't know the end 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.

‘More than 40 years after Midnight's Children, there is still nobody who spins a yarn quite like Salman Rushdie’ Spectator

‘Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities’ The Times

‘Salman Rushdie is a genius’ A.M. Homes
  • Published: 6 December 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787336049
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $55.00
Categories:

Media gallery

Extra Media

About the author

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

portrait photo of Salman Rushdie

Also by Salman Rushdie

Quichotte
Victory City
The Golden House
East, West
Home
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Languages of Truth
See all

Praise for The Eleventh Hour

The Eleventh Hour is a book of five stories about ageing and dying… It might sound bleak, but the writing is funny and frisky, full of pace and panache

Sunday Times

Entertaining and winningly heartfelt

Daily Telegraph

Compelling

London Standard

The opener is a beauty – it’s good to be back in Rushdie’s charming, witty world

The Times

At 78, Rushdie is still publishing impactful work; we can all doff our hats to one of the most important voices in contemporary literature

Independent

The energy of Rushdie’s prose and imagination…are as unflagging here as they were in his last novel, Victory City

i

Rushdie’s book characters tend to linger and stay in the reader’s mind long after the pages have been closed… his latest offering, The Eleventh Hour, is no different

UK Press Syndciation

A luminous collection

Economist, *Books of the Year*

The five short stories collected here feature the dead…yet Rushdie’s wry sense of mischief remains undimmed

Financial Times, *Books of the Year*