Midnight's Children

First published in 1981, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is an expansive, exuberant novel that intertwines the life of one extraordinary individual with the turbulent history of modern India. Saleem Sinai is born at the precise moment of Indian independence in 1947, and his fate becomes mysteriously bound to that of the nation; he shares this moment of birth with a thousand other children, each endowed with unusual powers. Through Saleem’s unreliable recollections, family histories, political upheavals and flights of magical invention, Rushdie explores the relationship between private memory and public history, between the accidents of individual lives and the forces that shape a country.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and later named the Booker of Bookers, the novel transformed the possibilities of contemporary English-language fiction. Its exuberant storytelling, shifting perspectives and fusion of myth, satire and historical narrative helped establish Rushdie as a major voice in postcolonial literature. Both a family saga and an imaginative reckoning with partition, nationalism and the promises of independence, Midnight’s Children remains a defining work of the late twentieth-century novel.

From the book

I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.

— Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

On Midnight’s Children

One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation.

— The New York Review of Books