Overview
- The English edition was published on November 4, with the German edition due November 12 from Penguin in Bernhard Robben’s translation.
- The collection comprises five short stories centered on death and marks Rushdie’s first work of fiction since the 2022 attack.
- Rushdie, 78, told CBS he wrote after an “intimate encounter with death,” and he continues to fuse the personal with political reflection.
- The book features explicit autobiographical passages and an allegory of free speech that personifies language as a threatened figure.
- Stylistically it sustains his humor and magical realism, weaving in figures such as Alan Turing, Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch, and he hints it may be “the last of its kind.”