Five short stories and five readers make up Salman Rushdie’s collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction since the near-fatal attack in 2022 where he sustained life-changing injuries. These tales find the author exploring legacy, mortality, loneliness and the ageing process. In these potentially bleak themes, Rushdie finds levity and laughter, as well as profundity.
Late, read by the actor Naveen Andrews, is a ghost story set in King’s College, Cambridge, where an honorary fellow, SM Arthur, wakes up dead in his college room and wonders if he will be trapped there for eternity. He meets a lonely but very much alive Indian student, Rosa, who is stuck at college for the holidays. Sid Sagar reads The Old Man in the Piazza, an allegory about free speech and how “we have become bar room moralists. Does the thumb point upward. Does it turn down? … We are all now gladiators in the Colosseum of the Thumb.”
The best of the stories, In the South, is narrated by Neil Shah who gives characterful voice to two elderly neighbours in Chennai, India, who spend their days bickering with each other on their porches. They are known as Senior and Junior because one is 17 days older than the other. Despite their cantankerousness, the two draw comfort from one another’s presence. When Junior dies on the street after being toppled by a passing Vespa – on the same day that a tsunami hits the south of the country – Senior comes to understand how “death and life [are] just adjacent verandas”.
• Available via Vintage Digital, 8hr 12min
Further listening
Kin
Tayari Jones, Oneworld Audio, 13hr, 10min
Angel Pean and Ashley J Hobbs narrate this sweeping tale of two best friends, born a few days apart in Louisiana, who grow up without mothers. As they get older, fate pulls them apart and they pursue different futures.
Land
Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, 16hr 47mins
Not long after the Irish famine, a cartographer’s son must finish a map of Ireland begun by his father away from the prying eyes of the British. This historical novel by the Hamnet author is read by Dane Whyte O’Hara.
