Midnight's Children

“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.”

Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author’s life and times.

The iconic masterpiece of India that introduced the world to “a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker)

WINNER OF THE BEST OF THE BOOKERS • SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • The fortieth anniversary edition, featuring a new introduction by the author

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Forty years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.