The Eleventh Hour

A Quintet of Stories

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Sanjeev Bhaskar, Nicholas Khan, Sid Sagar, Naveen Andrews, Neil Shah

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker • Financial Times • The Guardian • The Economist

From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie, an inventive collection of fiction that explores life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life

Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life’s final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work—India, England, and America—and feature an unforgettable cast of characters.

“In the South” introduces a pair of quarrelsome old men—Junior and Senior—and their private tragedy at a moment of national calamity. In “The Musician of Kahani,” a musical prodigy uses magical gifts to wreak devastation on the wealthy family she marries into. In "Late," the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to exact revenge upon the tormentor of his life. "Oklahoma" plunges a young writer into a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. And "The Old Man in the Piazza" is a powerful parable for our times about freedom of speech.

Do we accommodate ourselves to death or rail against it? Do we spend our “eleventh hour” in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don’t know the ends 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.

Critic reviews

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker • Financial Times • The Guardian • The Economist

“A luminous new collection of short stories.” —The Economist

“An inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden.” —Los Angeles Times

“[In The Eleventh Hour, Rushdie] makes death his leitmotif and, might I say, writes the life out it. . . . In a world of fatwas and fascism, the fact that wordsmiths like him are still around and writing is certainly a cause worth celebrating. The Eleventh Hour is that celebration, at least that’s how I read it cover to cover.” —Esquire

“The famed writer delivers a brilliant series of intimations of mortality. . . . A provocative set of tales that, though with grim moments, celebrate life, language, and love in the face of death.” —Kirkus Reviews, (starred review)

“Rushdie follows his memoir Knife with a marvelous story collection focused on themes of legacy and death. . . . Grounded in moving ruminations on the afterlife and what a person leaves behind, these stories sing.” —Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

“Rushdie returns in full transfixing force. . . . The evocative title, cuing us to a sense of urgency, is a unifying vision for these five tectonic tales and a gauge of Rushdie's astute perception of our current dire predicament. . . . Exquisitely sensitive. . . . Rushdie’s spectacularly imaginative eleventh-hour cautionary tales are enthralling, sagacious, and resounding.” —Booklist, (starred review)

“Rushdie’s towering talent is evident throughout The Eleventh Hour. He slips into a story as gracefully as Laurence Olivier vanished into a Shakespearean role. . . . Here, his fiction blends the real with the fable-like. No Anglophone writer does it better. . . . Witty if somber, The Eleventh Hour showcases the agility of one of our greatest writers in the aftermath of his brush with death.” —The Minnesota Star Tribune

“Leisurely, ruminative and genial.” —The Indian Express