Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie (1981)
“A man born at the exact midnight of Indian independence discovers that history isn't something that happens to you — you ARE it, and it is trying to kill you.”
At a Glance
Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 — the precise moment of Indian independence — narrates his life from pickle-making exile in Bombay. Gifted with a vast telepathic nose that connects him to 1,001 other 'midnight's children' born in the same hour, Saleem discovers his biography is entangled with the fate of the Indian nation itself. The novel spans three decades of South Asian history — Partition, the Emergency, the Bangladesh war — told in a sprawling, digressive voice that refuses to separate personal memory from national myth.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Won the 1981 Booker Prize and was subsequently named the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008) — the greatest Booker Prize winner across all years of the prize. Single-handedly established postcolonial fiction as a dominant form in English literature, opening the way for a generation of writers (Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Aravind Adiga) to write the Indian subcontinent in English on their own formal terms rather than in imitation of English models.
Diction Profile
High literary complexity with vernacular Bombay-English rhythms — Latinate complexity mixed with Indian idiom, Urdu borrowings, and Dickensian comic grotesque
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