‘The Eleventh Hour’: Salman Rushdie’s collection of stories set for November 4 release-OxBig News Network

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie is set to return with a new work of fiction, “The Eleventh Hour” — his first since the release of “Victor City” in 2023 — Penguin Random House India (PRHI) announced on Thursday.

Scheduled to release on November 4, it is touted to be “a moving, masterful collection of stories that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities”. It will be published under Penguin’s ‘Hamish’ imprint in India.

“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.

“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,” the 77-year-old British-American author said in a statement.

Whether it’s two feuding elderly men in Chennai grappling with personal tragedy amidst national disaster, or returning to the Bombay neighbourhood from “Midnight’s Children”, where a musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire, Rushdie’s upcoming book traverses the places he has lived, explored, and eventually left.

Rushdie’s last book, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” (2024), was his account of the brutal on-stage knife attack in which he permanently lost vision in one eye.

“‘The Eleventh Hour’ is Rushdie’s latest fiction. The stories and the settings in the book take us back to the themes and places that have shaped his writing and continue to be relevant today. I am delighted to publish it in India, and hope it is loved by readers,” said Milee Ashwarya, publisher at PRHI.