Book Of The Month January 2026

Quizlit’s Book of the Month January 2026 is the stunning new story collection The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie.

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Book of the Month January 2026

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

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.

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.

“The famed writer delivers a brilliant series of intimations of mortality. . . . A provocative set of tales that, though with grim moments, celebrate life, language, and love in the face of death.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Rushdie returns in full transfixing force . . . The evocative title, cuing us to a sense of urgency, is a unifying vision for these five tectonic tales and a gauge of Rushdie’s astute perception of our current dire predicament . . . exquisitely sensitive . . . Rushdie’s spectacularly imaginative eleventh-hour cautionary tales are enthralling, sagacious, and resounding.”—Booklist, starred review

“Rushdie follows his memoir Knife with a marvelous story collection focused on themes of legacy and death. . . . Grounded in moving ruminations on the afterlife and what a person leaves behind, these stories sing.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“At 78, Rushdie is still publishing impactful work; we can all doff our hats to one of the most important voices in contemporary literature.” —Independent

“An inventive and engrossing collection of stories which, though death-tinged, are never doom-laden. With luck this master writer has more tales to tell.” —Los Angeles Times

“Rushdie really needs no introduction, but let’s just say that a musing on life and what we leave behind is well worth picking up when it comes from an author who has himself survived several assassination attempts, was knighted for his contributions to literature, and is a foremost master of magical realism.”—CULTURED magazine