Salman Rushdie announces first fiction work since near-fatal stabbing

Author Salman Rushdie is set to release his first work of fiction since the attempt on his life in 2022.

"The Eleventh Hour", which comprises three novellas bookended by a prologue and epilogue, will be released globally on 4 November this year.

In its announcement of the book, publisher Penguin Random House described it as "a moving, masterful collection of stories that transport us around the world from Bombay neighbourhoods to elite English universities".

"Salman Rushdie’s new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left. In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face. How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the eleventh hour, the final stage of your life? How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home?"

Rushdie himself described the book in personal terms.

"The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last twelve 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."

While Rushdie's most recent novel, "Victory City", was published in 2023, he had already completed it before the attempt on his life in 2022, which came 33 years after the then-supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his execution in punishment for his novel "The Satanic Verses".

In his memoir recalling the attack, "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder", Rushdie described the moment he saw 24-year-old assailant Hadi Matar dashing towards him.

"In the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area," Rushdie wrote. "Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low. A squat missile."

“I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’"

"The Eleventh Hour" by Salman Rushdie will be published on 4 November (Vintage).