Midnight's Children Synopsis
'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.
About This Edition
About Salman Rushdie
Sir Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975.
His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight's Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history.
Shalimar The Clown, the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and daughter, and a fourth character who links them all, was published in 2005. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award.
In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
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