The Eleventh Hour

**If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour. ‘Salman Rushdie is a genius’ A.M. Homes** Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy during national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time. **‘More than 40 years after Midnight's Children, there is still nobody who spins a yarn quite like Salman Rushdie’ Spectator ‘Rushdie has not just enlarged literature’s capacities, he has expanded the world’s imaginative possibilities’ The Times**