Salman Rushdie’s new collection of short stories urgently recollects his literary legacy. It’s as though time is increasingly uncertain so the need to tell stories is great.

Its title, The Eleventh Hour, says as much, and the book succeeds Knife (2024), written about his attack on stage in 2022. The central story portrays students and writers in the libraries of English literary history. Two stories set in India consider the entangled states of faith and doubt. The final two tales are set in America, employing stylistic innovation to address grand questions about authenticity, censorship and fraud.

The story In the South, first published in US magazine The New Yorker, questions the logic of death and ageing. Written after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami estimated to have killed 250,000 people, it introduces two elderly neighbours and their encounters with relatives and neighbours.

Typically Rushdie in structural and narrative prowess, it portrays the astounding everyday. Recalling stories in his earlier collection East, West (1995), it is a close character study interrogating the minute but asking huge questions.

Nicknamed Junior and Senior, the neighbours’ only........

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