Midnight's Children

Saleem Sinai is born at midnight on August 15, 1947 — the exact moment of Indian independence — and is therefore, as he tells us, handcuffed to history. He is one of 1,001 children born in that midnight hour, each gifted with a supernatural power, each a metaphor for independent India's possibilities. Rushdie writes in a prose that overflows with allusion, digression, comedy, and grief — the novel as India itself, too large and contradictory to be contained. Booker Prize winner. The foundational postcolonial novel in English and still the most formally exhilarating dispatch from inside a nation's birth.