Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children

Booker Prize Winner 1981

Voted the Booker of Bookers in 1993

Midnight's Children is a captivating allegory of modern India, combining a family saga with the volatile events which shaped this fascinating, complex and divided nation.

The stroke of midnight

Born on 15 August 1947, at the precise moment of India's independence from the British Empire, Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru. As Saleem grows up, he realises he shares a fate with one thousand other children born in the initial hour of India's independence: all are gifted with supernatural powers. Saleem’s gift is telepathy and his destiny is inextricably linked to one of these midnight children in particular – the son of a poor Hindu woman, with whom he was swapped at birth by a well-meaning midwife.

Rushdie's seminal work

Epic in scale, taking the reader from the courtship of Saleem’s grandparents in the early days of Gandhi’s resistance, through independence, partition, war and the imposition of martial law. Seen through Saleem’s eyes and narrated in his engaging, garrulous style, it succeeds brilliantly in blending personal life with national history, and exploring the struggle for identity that affects both – a duality exquisitely captured in Anna Bhushan’s watercolour illustrations.

As Rushdie explains in his introduction, the origins of the book, and many of its characters, lie in his own childhood memories of Bombay. Funny, engrossing and haunting, Midnight's Children is deservedly ranked among the greatest works in contemporary fiction.

In 1981 an entirely unknown writer called Salman Rushdie won with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, a compendious fictionalisation of the history of India in the twentieth century. The judges had recognised something extraordinary, a book that brought a new energy to English fiction. It ebulliently combined cultures and languages, Indian myths and stories from eighteenth century English novels. Before too long it appeared to have announced a fertile decade for British fiction. In Rushdie’s wake, novelists seemed freed to discover a delight in formal experiment. To reread the novel now is to find its inventiveness and buoyancy undiminished. It is a traditional family saga as well as a book that introduced a new way of fabling to the British novel reader. For all its narrative tricks, it delights us with the sights and sounds and, perhaps above all, smells that make it a realistic novel as well as a famously ‘magical’ one.

As taken from, The Booker Effect, by John Mullan.