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If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.

Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight''s Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can''t rest until he avenges his former tormentor.

Following Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, 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?

The Eleventh Hour is the magisterial new work from one of our greatest living writers. It speaks deeply to what Salman Rushdie has come from and through, and strikes into the heart of our fractious times.

© Salman Rushdie 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025