Salman Rushdie is releasing a new story collection, titled The Eleventh Hour, that will explore themes “that have been much” on his mind, including mortality, anger and peace.
The publication marks the Booker Prize Winner’s first fiction work since he was stabbed in New York in August 2022, as he wrote his 2023 novel, Victory City, prior to the incident.
Attacks against Rushdie have been feared since the late 1980s after his novel The Satanic Verses was declared blasphemous by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The Eleventh Hour follows two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, who experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity.
It will revisit the Bombay neighbourhood of Rushdie’s award-winning second novel Midnight Children, where a magical magician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire.
In another tale set at an English university, an undead academic cannot pass over until he exacts vengeance on his former tormentor.
Rushdie said of the work: “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 continued: “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 author said.
Rushdie’s new fiction collection will be published in hardback by Vintage, a division at Penguin Random House UK, on 4 November.
Vintage said in a statement: “Following Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, his new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and 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?”
His other works include Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie is also a prominent advocate for free expression and a former president of PEN America. He was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and made the Queen’s last Birthday Honours list in 2022.
The Eleventh Hour will be published on 4 November 2025.