The Eleventh Hour
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 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. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through.
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? How do we achieve fulfilment with our lives if we don't know the end of our own stories? 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.
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He became famous with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which brought to him the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his writing is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.
If India was once the pearl in the crown of the ex-British Empire, the Bombay-born Salman Rushdie is a priceless jewel of his own in the realm of the contemporary English literature. Irreverent, fearless and constantly on the hunt for new, forever more enchanting universes to be discovered, the British-Indian writer has so far built, both through his literary opus magnum and through his public engagements, a reputation of a highly praised and highly controversial modern times genius. His second novel “Midnight Children’ (1981), a masterful depiction of the metamorphoses in post-colonial India, was immediately spotted by the critics and won the Man Booker prize. Upon the publishing of his “Satanic Verses” (1988), probably the most discussed and scandalous piece of modern prose, atrociously accused of being a blasphemy on the Muslim world, humanity turned over night into a pack of insatiable readers. “Shame” (1983) fuses magic and historical realism, in an almost indiscernible fashion, to create of tortured portrait of Pakistan. In 2007 Salman Rushdie was appointed a Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Elizabeth II for “services in literature”.
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