Midnight's Children: Introduction by Anita Desai

'BEST OF THE BOOKER' AWARD WINNER - This towering classic of international literature is at once a riveting family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.

"One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation." --The New York Review of Books

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.

Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and then in 2008 it was named "The Best of the Booker," the best book to have won the prize in the forty years of its existence.

Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Published: 10/17/1995
Pages: 632
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.44lbs
Size: 8.35h x 5.56w x 1.38d
ISBN: 9780679444626

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 8.4
Point Value: 38
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 43294 / Midnight's Children


Award: Man Booker Prize - Winner


Review Citation(s):
People Weekly 11/17/2008 pg. 49
Time 07/13/2009 pg. 55

About the Author
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. His most recent novel is The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which was published in 1999. Salman Rushdie was awarded Germany's Author of the Year Award for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. In 1993, Midnight's Children was voted the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In the same year, he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is also Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen languages.