Midnight's Children

An allegory of modern India, Midnight's Children is a family saga set against the volatile events in 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 both fragmentation and the struggle for identity that links personal life with national history.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of Indias 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 Indias 1,000 other “midnights 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. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnights Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

Salman Rushdie was awarded Germanys Author of the Year Award for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. In 1993, Midnights Children was voted the ‘Booker of Bookers, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In the same year, he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is also Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen languages.