Midnight's Children

by Salman Rushdie

Born at midnight on independence day. Handcuffed to history.

For you if

you want to understand India's independence and everything that followed through a novel as large and chaotic and alive as the country itself

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Saleem Sinai is born at midnight on August 15, 1947 — the exact moment of Indian independence — and is therefore, as he tells us, handcuffed to history. He is one of 1,001 children born in that midnight hour, each gifted with a supernatural power, each a metaphor for independent India's possibilities. Rushdie writes in a prose that overflows with allusion, digression, comedy, and grief — the novel as India itself, too large and contradictory to be contained. Booker Prize winner. The foundational postcolonial novel in English and still the most formally exhilarating dispatch from inside a nation's birth.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: India • South Asia
Voice: Written by a Indian author
Themes: coming of age national identity
Topics: indian independence movement partition of india

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