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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 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 probes life and death, legacy and identity, with wit, creativity, and keen insight.
"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)
"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)
This information about The Eleventh Hour was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen previous novels, including Midnight's Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. He is a member of the ...
... Full Biography
Link to Salman Rushdie's Website
Name Pronunciation
Salman Rushdie: sal-MARN RUSH-dee
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