Salman Rushdie Announces 'The Eleventh Hour,' First Fiction Work Since 2022 Stabbing Attack

Salman Rushdie set to publish his first book since his stabbing, The Eleventh Hour. It will feature three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England, and the US.

Salman Rushdie’s last book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024), was his account of the brutal on-stage knife attack.

Source : X/@SalmanRushdie

British-American novelist Salman Rushdie is set to publish his first major work of fiction later this year since he was attacked in 2022. The Eleventh Hour comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US, all places Rushdie has lived.

"The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last twelve months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind – mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America," he said in a statement released by Penguin Publishing, as per AFP.

“I’m happy that the stories, very different from one another in setting, story and technique, nevertheless manage to be in conversation with one another, and with the two stories that serve as prologue and epilogue to this threesome,” Rushdie added, as per the report. It will be released on November 4, 2025.

Rushdie’s last book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024), was his account of the brutal on-stage knife attack in which he permanently lost vision in one eye.

Rushdie Stabbing

The would-be assassin, Hadi Matar, a New Jersey man who stabbed author Rushdie at a literary event in New York state, was charged with attempted murder and assault. Matar was convicted at a trial in upstate New York, during which Rushdie gave vivid testimony about the incident.

Rushdie told jurors of Matar "stabbing and slashing" him during an event at an upscale cultural centre in rural New York.

During the trial, Matar's legal team tried to prevent witnesses from portraying Rushdie as a victim of persecution stemming from Iran's 1989 fatwa, which called for his murder over alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses. Earlier, Matar had told the media that he had read only read two pages of "The Satanic Verses" but believed the author had "attacked Islam."

Matar was found guilty of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade that was shown to witnesses and the court.

As per AFP, the 1988 novel brought Rushdie at the centre of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, especially Islam, was unacceptable in any circumstance.

 Rushdie into was in the spotlight with his second novel "Midnight's Children" (1981), which won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India. But "The Satanic Verses" brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention.

Rushdie’s other works include “Luka and the Fire of Life”, “Grimus”, “Shame”, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, “The Moor’s Last Sigh”, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” and “Fury”.