The Eleventh Hour

Voice of the Voiceless

By: Salman Rushdie

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

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 the US—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 from the Mumbai neighborhood featured in Midnight’s Children uses her 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 enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. “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 end 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

“Rushdie’s towering talent is evident throughout The Eleventh Hour, his fiction blends the real with the fable-like. No Anglophone writer does it better . . . The prose here is Rushdie at his supple best, restrained yet daring . . . There’s a twist in this piece, ‘Late,’ that underscores Rushdie’s wizardry on the page. While diverse in technique, each story in The Eleventh Hour springs from a common argument: Language, whether spoken or read or imagined, transforms us all.”—The Minnesota Star Tribune

“Meticulously constructed . . . Rushdie has hundreds of imitators, in multiple languages, but no equals.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“These are stories of old men approaching the end, or already past its threshold, gracefully told by a writer who has edged near enough to it himself.”—The New Statesman

“Best of all is The Musician of Kahani which could have been crafted into a satisfying novel . . . Perhaps this is his goodbye, or perhaps and preferably he’s clearing the decks for something new.”—The Irish Independent

“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 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 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

“At 78, Rushdie is still publishing impactful work; we can all doff our hats to one of the most important voices in contemporary literature.” —Independent

“An inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.” —Los Angeles Times

“Rushdie really needs no introduction, but let’s just say that a musing on life and what we leave behind is well worth picking up when it comes from an author who has himself survived several assassination attempts, was knighted for his contributions to literature, and is a foremost master of magical realism.”—CULTURED magazine