The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories is a collection of shorter fiction by writer Salman Rushdie. It was published on 4 November 2025 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Random House in the U.S.
Rushdie announced that he was working on a new work of fiction at the Lviv BookForum in October 2024. The collection contains Rushdie's first fiction written since the stabbing attack on 12 August 2022 that left him blind in one eye.
"" is a phrase used in the Gospel of Matthew's Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard to signify the very end of the working day; in contemporary usage it means the last possible moment before it is too late. Rushdie explained that he was 78 at the time of publication and had survived "a fairly intimate encounter with death", and so the idea of running out of time was something that was on his mind.
The Eleventh Hour contains three novellas and two shorter pieces, set in India, England and the United States. All five address the issues of age, mortality and memory.
Reviewing The Eleventh Hour in The Observer, critic Anthony Cummins described it as rambling and uneven, with "noise, bombast and the accumulation of references [serving] as substitutes for character, scene-setting and drama"; he singled out "The Musician of Kahani" â "simple but effective" â as by far the book's best offering. In The Guardian, Kevin Power praised "In the South" as a deft and moving anecdote while finding "Late" and "The Musician of Kahani" (which he described as a reprise of "Rushdie's greatest hits") entertaining but not particularly strong.