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by Salman Rushdie
This towering classic of international literature is at once a riveting family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.
Saleem Sinai, the hero of Midnight's Children, is one of the thousand and one children born in India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the dawn of its independence from British rule—the moment, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when India had her "'tryst with destiny.'" The twists and turns of this destiny form the springboard from which Salman Rushdie launches into his celebrated fantasia of our modernity.
At once a fairy tale, a furious political satire, and a meditation on the ways in which time and change both shape and are shaped by the life of a single individual, Midnight's Children announced the triumphant return of epic storytelling to our highly evolved literary tradition. With its central themes of displacement and indeterminacy, and its highly original use of a polyglot vocabulary absorbed form three distinct but overlapping cultures, this book anticipated and to a certain extent defined the multifarious, dislocated, ever-expanding world in which, increasingly, we all live.
"In Salman Rushdie...India has produced a glittering novelist-one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling. Like García Márquez...he weaves a whole people's capacity for carrying its inherited myths-and new ones that it goes on generating-into a kind of magic carpet...Saleem Sinai...is dramatizing his past life as a prophecy, even universalizing his history as a mingling of farce and horror and matching it with thirty years of the Indian crowd's collective political history.... As a tour de force his fantasy is irresistible." —The New Yorker
"One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation." —The New York Review of Books
This information about Midnight's Children (Everyman's Library) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Salman Rushdie was born in 1947 and has lived in England since 1961. He is the author of six novels: Grimus, Midnight's Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981 and the James Tait Black Prize, Shame, winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, The Satanic Verses, which won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which won the Writers' Guild Award and The Moor's Last Sigh which won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. He has also published a collection of short stories East, West, a book of reportage The Jaguar Smile, a volume of essays Imaginary Homelands, and a work of film criticism The Wizard of Oz.
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