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That return to fiction continued with ‘The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories’, published in 2025. The collection, made up of five shorter works, turns towards mortality, memory, Bombay, England, America and the question of what remains when a writer begins to sense time narrowing. If ‘Knife’ was Rushdie confronting violence directly, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ shows him returning to invention, still unwilling to surrender the imaginative excess that made his fiction unmistakable.