November global fiction: Salman Rushdie’s new quintet of stories and five new novels

All information sourced from publishers.

The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, Salman Rushdie

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 the US – 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 from the Mumbai neighbourhood featured in Midnight’s Children uses her 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 enact revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. “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.
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 Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell

Tara Selter has lived the 18th of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind – trapped in the 18th of November, but no longer alone.

Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently to Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it.

The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgård, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all.

Kristian Hadeland, newly arrived in the city, seethes with ambition and contempt. His family in Norway never understood him; his fellow photography students bore him. But he knows he and his art are destined for more.

Then he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist. With Hans, the future Kristian yearns for is tangible. All art is possible. Any line can be crossed.

But success comes at a price. And when Kristian does the unthinkable, will he be prepared to pay for it?

Jesus Christ Kinski, Benjamin Myers

Klaus Kinski, Germany’s most controversial actor, steps into the spotlight to a crowd of thousands.

After years of making movies abroad, he has returned to the stage for a much-publicised one-man performance about Jesus Christ. As the crowd turns on him and violence is threatened, it is also very nearly his last. After this week, he will never perform on stage again.

Exactly fifty years later, a hypochondriac writer, housebound by winter snowstorms, becomes fixated with video footage of Kinski at his most manic.

In this forensic analysis, he strays into the darker corners of modern culture and finally begins to understand the compulsive urge that drives artists to the edge of sanity in their pursuit of perfection.

Bad Bad Girl, Gish Jen

Growing up in an affluent neighbourhood in 1930s Shanghai, Loo Shu-hsin is told that it is “no good for a girl to be smart” – and yet when rumours of the revolution reach their enclave, she is the one sent abroad for an education. In New York, she meets Chao-Pei, a Chinese engineering student, and they set out to make a life together. By the time their daughter – Gish Jen – is born, her parents have only sporadic contact with their families, who are locked in repressive Maoist China. And in her struggle to discipline her American daughter, Loo Shu-hsin finds herself repeating the punishing refrains – “Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!” – that punctured her own childhood.

Favorita, Michelle Steinbeck, translated from the Italian by Jen Calleja

Fila’s mother Magdalena caused chaos every time she appeared in her daughter’s life. Fila hasn’t seen her in years, not since she disgraced their family by advertising her brothel in the newspaper.

Now, news comes from Italy: Magdalena is dead. It’s time for Fila to finally face her family history.

Fila collects her mother’s ashes and sets out, urn in tow, to retrace the whirlwind life of the woman last known as Favorita.