From the Gospel of Matthew to Doctor Who, many texts have used the idiom "the eleventh hour" to refer to the last possible moment before an opportunity becomes unfeasible. Salman Rushdie (The Golden House) joins that group with The Eleventh Hour, a collection of five stories in which he offers perspectives on mortality, with side trips to thrillingly expatiate on ghosts, cinema, and more. In the opener, "In the South," two 81-year-old men in India trek to the post office to cash their pension checks when one of them suffers a frightening fall. "The Musician of Kahani" is the story of a music prodigy whose playing skills "acquired powers of enchantment," and the use she puts those powers to when confronted with unreasonable demands from her "rich-rich-rich" in-laws.
While those stories brilliantly explore the inevitability of death, "Late" features a protagonist who has already faced it, in its tale of an honorary fellow at a British university who wakes up to discover he's dead, and the history student who is the only person who can communicate with him. The final works are "Oklahoma," a story of an Indian author's friendship with an older writer who may or may not have walked into a body of water like Virginia Woolf, and "The Old Man in the Piazza," an amusing piece about a café dweller who accidentally develops a reputation as "a judge with the wisdom of Solomon." Books about mortality are nothing new, but Rushdie gives the subject his distinctive spin, highbrow yet accessible, in this exuberant collection --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer