NEW YORK – Salman Rushdie has a collection of novellas and short stories coming out this fall, his first published fiction since being stabbed repeatedly and hospitalized in 2022.
Random House announced Thursday that Rushdie's “The Eleventh Hour,” billed by the publisher as “five interlinked stories and novellas that explore the eternal mysteries of the eleventh hour of life,” will be released Nov. 4.
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According to Random House, Rushdie's new book will include such “unforgettable characters” as a “musical prodigy with a magical gift,” the ghost of a Cambridge don who helps a student “avenge the tormentor of his lifetime” and a literary mentor who has mysteriously died. “The Eleventh Hour” is set in three parts of the world where Rushdie has lived: India, England and the U.S.
“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,” Rushdie said in a statement released through Random House. “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.”
Rushdie’s fiction, notably the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children,” has brought him his greatest acclaim. His other novels include “Shame,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Victory City,” which he completed shortly before the stabbing on a lecture stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.
In February, the 77-year-old Rushdie returned to the area and testified in the trial against his assailant, Hadi Matar. A jury found Matar guilty of assault and attempted murder, convictions that could lead to up to 25 years in prison. The judge has set sentencing for April 23.
Rushdie’s memoir about the attack, “Knife,” was published last year and was a finalist for a National Book Award. But he has spoken of fiction as a sign of further healing and restored imaginative powers, whether after being forced into hiding in 1989 because of the fatwa calling for his death over the alleged blasphemy of the novel “The Satanic Verses” or recovering from the attack three years ago that blinded him in one eye and caused lasting nerve damage.
Promoting “Knife” in 2024, Rushdie told The Associated Press that before writing the memoir, he had attempted fiction. But he acknowledged that the assault had become impossible to ignore.
“I didn’t want to write this book,” he said of “Knife” at the time. “I actually wanted to get back to fiction, and I tried and it just seemed stupid. I just thought, ‘Look, something very big happened to you.’”