Salman Rushdie to publish new fiction book later this year
The Eleventh Hour will be the Booker Prize winner’s first book since 2023’s Victory City.
Sir Salman Rushdie has announced he is to release his first fiction book in nearly three years following a 2022 stabbing that left him blind in one eye.
The 77-year-old Indian-born British novelist will release The Eleventh Hour, a collection of stories from around the world, set in Bombay neighbourhoods and English universities, on November 4.
It will be the Booker Prize winner’s first fiction since 2023’s Victory City, and will be published by Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House.
Speaking about the book, Sir Salman said: “The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last 12 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 Eleventh Hour sees two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity, Sir Salman revisit the Bombay neighbourhood of his book Midnight’s Children, and the story of a magical musician who is unhappily married to a multibillionaire.
Another story follows an undead academic in an English college, who cannot rest until he exacts vengeance upon his former tormentor.
It comes after the author released the autobiographical book Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder in April 2024. In it he recounted the attack, which saw Hadi Matar run on to the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in the US where Sir Salman was about to speak in August 2022.
Matar, who stabbed the author more than a dozen times before a live audience, was found guilty of his attempted murder in February.
Sir Salman has released 16 novels during his career including Midnight’s Children, for which he won the Booker Prize, The Satanic Verses and Quichotte, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Released in September 1988, The Satanic Verses prompted then Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for Sir Salman’s death in 1989 after publication of the novel, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Sir Salman spent years in hiding, but after Iran later announced it would not enforce the decree, he has travelled freely over the past quarter of a century.
