Published By: Jonathan Cape
Pages: 272
Released On: 04/11/2025
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy during 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.
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? 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.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Jonathan Cape for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had actually pre-ordered this, but due to financial difficulties I had to cancel it, and so I was thrilled when Jonathan Cape sent me an e-arc. I adore Salman Rushdie’s work and was super excited to give this a read.
It is quite intense – I didn’t expect anything less really – but the relative short page length ensures it doesn’t get too overwhelming.
It had the potential to be quite disheartening, a bit morbid, as there’s a lot of talk about death and whatnot, but somehow he’s framed it in a way that makes it realistic, somehow uplifting, but tender and sensitive.
There are a number of stories in this book with a number of characters, but they do come together thematically which was nice. And it gave us time to get to know each character and their story individually. I’m not usually a short story person and to be honest, I wanted to read this on the merit of being a Salman Rushdie book, and so I didn’t actually know it was short stories, but it was fine. Like most collection of stories, there were some I liked better than others, and others I struggled with, but overall they are a thought-provoking bunch.
It’s got a poetical feel to the writing, and in that sense there’s always a worry it will be more style than substance, but he’s given us both. Whether you like the actual story or not, there’s no denying his brilliance at storytelling.
Another review said it felt like reading a classic, and I hadn’t thought of that but I think I agree. Classics can be hard to get through, and whilst this wasn’t necessarily hard to get through, there is a lot of character development and theorising, rather than action or plot, and so in that sense it did have a classical feel to it. And if I’m honest, I think Salman’s books are likely to become classics in their own right.
There’s death and the afterlife, the meaning of life and death, language, family, and love – it’s intense but enjoyable.
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