Review: The Eleventh Hour

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie is a collection of five stories and the first book of fiction the author has published since the violence he was violently attacked three years ago. This is a book of literary fiction with a capital L. There are many literary references to authors including Bellow, Calvino, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, R. Tagore, films by Godard, S. Ray, Rushdie’s beloved Wizard of Oz. This is a decidedly language driven book as can be seen in the very first sentence:

The day Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising up from the floor below, the pelvic thrusts of an “item number” dancing across a neighbor’s TV; a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree.

My favorite story in the collection “In the South” continues the magical realism Rushdie used in earlier books like Midnight’s Children. It starts

The College was almost six hundred years old. It had been founded by a king who was mad for most of his life. After his death he began performing miracles, blinding an enemy from beyond the grave and raising a plague victim from the dead, or so people came to believe. Such occurrences, if true, may serve as a sort of foreshadowing of the unusual events that occurred more recently, approximately fifty-five years ago, and that will be set down without judgment in this belated account. They are events that cannot easily be accommodated within a rigorously rational description of the world.

Personally I enjoyed the book, although there were moments I wondered if the author was not perhaps being a little too clever. I recommend The Eleventh Hour.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a free copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

epub. 272 pgs. 24 October 2025. Publishing 4 November 2025.