La penúltima hora

Following the 2022 attack in which he nearly lost his life, recounted in his previous book, Knife, "our Scheherazade"—as Ursula K. Le Guin called him—returns to fiction. In these five stories, Salman Rushdie's boundless imagination takes on a twilight tone. He returns to his roots, to the streets of Bombay from Midnight's Children, where he encounters old characters from the 1981 novel, and completes a journey through the three countries where he has lived: India, England, and the United States. Do we succumb to death or resist it? How do we say goodbye to the places that have been our home? In these stories featuring two elderly criminals, an unhappy marriage filled with music, dollars and magic, the ghost of an English academic with a thirst for revenge, a mysterious death and a beautiful parable about freedom of expression, Rushdie confronts the penultimate hour of life and reflects on death and legacy, identity and belonging.