Salman Rushdie’s new short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, confronts mortality with a series of tales that explore ageing, death, and the supernatural. The 78-year-old author, who survived a fatwa and a 2022 stabbing, opens with “In the South”, a story about two 81-year-old friends facing their final years. Rushdie writes, “If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.”
The collection’s title story, “Late”, features a ghostly writer haunting an English university, blending elements of E.M. Forster and Alan Turing. At over 70 pages, it is ambitious but disjointed. In contrast, “The Musician of Kahani” is a vibrant 80-page tale that satirises modern India, echoing Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with its protagonist born at midnight.
“Oklahoma” explores literary obsession through an unreliable narrator searching for a vanished writer, while the short allegory “The Old Man in the Piazza” critiques cancel culture. Despite its flaws, the collection showcases Rushdie’s unflagging prose and imagination, offering a moving reckoning with his own legacy and the passage of time.
