The first book to be featured this season on the Sara Cox Radio 2 Book Club is The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie—an enthralling, profound collection of stories about the meaning of home and the questions that await us all at the end of our lives.
The book was released on 4 November and Salman’s interview with Sara is on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 4 November.
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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 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?
About the author
Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1947, Rushdie was educated at Cambridge where he joined the Cambridge Footlights. His first novel Grimus was published in 1975 but it was his second, Midnight’s Children, which established his reputation. A sweeping epic of India’s history as seen through the eyes of a factory worker, it won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 1993 was pronounced the ‘Booker of Bookers’, in a celebration marking the award’s 25-year history.
In 1988 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses which won the Whitbread Novel Award. A fictional depiction of the history of Islam the book’s subject matter led to blasphemy accusations and protests by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. In 1989 the orthodox Iranian government issued a fatwā against Rushdie, forcing him to go into hiding for several years.
Since then Rushdie has continued to write and publish books, essays and plays for adults and children. These include the novels Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence and The Golden House as well as the travelogue The Jaguar Smile and the memoir Joseph Anton.
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours on 16 June 2007.
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I will listen to that interview on BBC Sounds