Description

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on the 15th of August, 1947 — at the precise instant of India’s independence — and his life, he discovers, will be inextricably handcuffed to the life of his nation.

He is one of 1,001 children born in that first hour, each gifted with strange and miraculous powers. Saleem himself can read minds. Another can travel through time. Another can step into mirrors. Together they form the Midnight Children’s Conference — a telepathic parliament of the post-colonial possible.

Across one of the great novels of the twentieth century, Salman Rushdie pours the entire history of modern South Asia — Partition, the wars with Pakistan and China, the rise of Indira Gandhi, the Emergency, the loss of Bangladesh — into a single dazzling, magical, scatological, hilarious, heartbroken family saga. The result is a novel that did for India what *One Hundred Years of Solitude* did for Latin America: it gave the subcontinent a language for telling its own modern story.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. The single most important Indian novel in English of the twentieth century.