New Delhi, Mar 27 (PTI) Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie is set to return with a new work of fiction, “The Eleventh Hour”, his first since the release of “Victor City” in 2023, Penguin Random House India (PRHI) announced on Thursday.
The collection of stories, scheduled to release on November 4, is touted to be “a moving, masterful collection of stories that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities”.
It will be published under Penguin’s ‘Hamish’ imprint in India.
“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.
“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. 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,” the 77-year-old British-American author said in a statement.
Whether it’s two feuding elderly men in Chennai grappling with personal tragedy amidst national disaster, or returning to the Bombay neighborhood from “Midnight’s Children”, where a musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire, Rushdie’s upcoming book traverses the places he has lived, explored, and eventually left.
“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?” reads the description of the book.
Rushdie’s last book, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” (2024), was his account of the brutal on-stage knife attack in which he permanently lost vision in one eye.
The acclaimed author was on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in August 2022 when he was stabbed up to 12 times by the accused Hadi Matar in prison for attempted murder.
“‘The Eleventh Hour’ by Salman Rushdie is his latest fiction after the global bestseller ‘Knife’. The stories and the settings in the book take us back to the themes and places that have shaped Rushdie’s writing and continue to be relevant today. I am delighted to publish The Eleventh Hour in India, and hope it is loved by readers in the subcontinent,” said Milee Ashwarya, publisher at PRHI.
Rushdie’s works include “Luka and the Fire of Life”, “Grimus”, “Midnight’s Children” (for which he won the Booker Prize and, later, the Best of the Booker), “Shame”, “The Satanic Verses”, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, “The Moor’s Last Sigh”, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” and “Fury”.
His memoir is titled “Joseph Anton”— named for the pseudonym he used while in hiding following the fatwa that had been issued by Khomeini in the midst of widespread controversy over Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses”. PTI MG BK BK BK
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