New Releases by Salman Rushdie

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker • Financial Times • The Guardian • The Economist From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie, an inventive collection of fiction that explores life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life Rushdie turns his extraordinary imagination to life’s final act with a quintet of stories that span the three countries in which he has made his work—India, England, and America—and feature an unforgettable cast of characters. “In the South” introduces a pair of quarrelsome old men—Junior and Senior—and their private tragedy at a moment of national calamity. In “The Musician of Kahani,” a musical prodigy uses magical gifts to wreak devastation on the wealthy family she marries into. In "Late," the ghost of a Cambridge don enlists the help of a lonely student to exact revenge upon the tormentor of his life. "Oklahoma" plunges a young writer into a web of deceit and lies as he tries to figure out whether his mentor killed himself or faked his own death. And "The Old Man in the Piazza" is a powerful parable for our times about freedom of speech. Do we accommodate ourselves to death or rail against it? Do we spend our “eleventh hour” in serenity or in rage? And how do we achieve fulfillment with our lives if we don’t know the ends of our own stories? The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity, with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man wearing black clothes and a black mask rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are. What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide. Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

After a battle in 14th-century southern India, a girl named Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess and spends 250 years seeking to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world.

A selection of essays, reviews and speeches by Salman Rushdie from 2003 to 2020.

While contending with a midlife crisis, a writer of spy thrillers creates a Don Quixote-esque character who goes on a quest to prove himself worthy of a TV star.

In The Good Books, over 50 writers-including Yiyun Li, Anne Fadiman, Karen Russell, Gary Shteyngart, David Shields, and many more-choose the works in translation they'd bring to a great global book swap. Also talks and conversation by Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and other participants in the 1986 PEN Congress. Plus fiction, poetry, essays, and comics from around the world.

The original stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, winner of the 1993 Booker of Bookers, the best book to win the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years. In the moments of upheaval that surround the stroke of midnight on August 14--15, 1947, the day India proclaimed its independence from Great Britain, 1,001 children are born--each of whom is gifted with supernatural powers. Midnight’s Children focuses on the fates of two of them--the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the male heir of a wealthy Muslim family--who become inextricably linked when a midwife switches the boys at birth. An allegory of modern India, Midnight’s Children is a family saga set against the volatile events of the thirty years following the country’s independence--the partitioning of India and Pakistan, the rule of Indira Gandhi, the onset of violence and war, and the imposition of martial law. It is a magical and haunting tale, of fragmentation and of the struggle for identity and belonging that links personal life with national history. In collaboration with Simon Reade, Tim Supple and the Royal Shakespeare Society, Salman Rushdie has adapted his masterpiece for the stage.

Winner of the Booker prize and twice winner of the Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children is "one of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation" (New York Review of Books). Reissued for the 40th anniversary of the original publication--with a new introduction from the author--Salman Rushdie's widely acclaimed novel is a masterpiece in literature. Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

From one of the great novelists of our day, a vital, brilliant new book of essays, speeches and articles essential for our times. Step Across This Line showcases the other side of one of fiction's most astonishing conjurors. On display is Salman Rushdie's incisive, thoughtful and generous mind, in prose that is as entertaining as it is topical. The world is here, captured in pieces on a dazzling array of subjects: from New York's Amadou Diallo case to the Wizard of Oz, from U2 to fifty years of Indian writing, from a tribute to Angela Carter to the struggle to film Midnight's Children. The title essay was originally delivered at Yale as the 2002 Tanner lecture on human values, and examines the changing meaning of frontiers in the modern world -- moral and metaphorical frontiers as well as physical ones.The collection chronicles Rushdie's intellectual journeys, but it is also an intimate invitation into his life: he explores his relationship to India through a moving diary of his first visit there in over a decade, "A Dream of Glorious Return." Step Across This Line also includes "Messages From the Plague Years," a historic set of letters, articles and reflections on life under the fatwa. Gathered together for the first time, this is Rushdie's humane, intelligent and angry response to a grotesque threat, aimed not just at him but at free expression itself.Step Across This Line, Salman Rushdie's first collection of non-fiction in a decade, has the same energy, imagination and erudition as his astounding novels -- along with some very strong opinions.From the Hardcover edition.

For Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz is more than a children's film, and more than a fantasy. It's a story whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, in which the weakness of grown ups forces children to take control of their own destinies.

Moraes Zogoiby offers a revealing account of his family, their evolving fortunes, and the lost world of possibilities in twentieth-century India, recounting a universe of family rifts, greed, dark passion, secrecy, power, and the mysteries of art. 100,000 first printing.

When storyteller extraordinary Rashid Khalifa (a.k.a. The Shah of Blah) loses his gift of gab, he and his son Haroun must embark on a journey through fantastic lands to recover it.