Midnight's Children

A child born at the exact moment of India’s independence discovers he is telepathically connected to all one thousand and one children born in that same midnight hour. Rushdie’s Booker of Bookers winner is postcolonial literature at its most exuberant and ambitious.

Why Read This

Where Achebe writes with spare, clear prose about a specific community, Rushdie writes with maximalist excess about an entire nation. Midnight’s Children reimagines the history of modern India through magical realism, autobiography, and sheer narrative invention. It is the postcolonial novel as epic, proving that the colonized world’s stories are not smaller than Europe’s but larger, wilder, and more alive.

What to Expect

A long, densely inventive novel. The prose is exuberant and the structure playful. More demanding than Achebe but brilliantly entertaining. Winner of the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers.