iNews
Salman Rushdie’s new book is concerned with looming endings. In the very first in this collection of short stories, “In the South”, he writes, of two 81-year-old friends, “If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.”
It makes sense that The Eleventh Hour should see the now 78-year-old Rushdie considering his own mortality – he has been forced to do so for some time. In 1989, Iran’s then supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death because his novel The Satanic Verses was deemed blasphemous. In 2022, he was stabbed repeatedly while giving a lecture in New York state and left blind in his right eye, an experience he examined in his last book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted