| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780812976533 | | Publisher: Random House Trade | | Publish Date: 4/4/2006 | | Buy.com Sku: 202145852 | | Item#: R5F7RQ | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 79164 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5.25L x 1.25T | | Pages: 624 |
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| | | Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence, 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, and telepathic powers link him with the other children born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.
Annotation:
Considered Salman Rushdie's masterpiece, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN has become a part of the literary canon, drawing comparisons to ARABIAN NIGHTS for its multi-layered narrative, to Joyce's ULYSSES for its literary and linguistic inventiveness, to Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE for its lush magical-realism, and Gunter Grass's THE TIN DRUM, for its ability to capture the history and zeitgeist of a nation. The novel is narrated by Saleem Sinai, a child born at the exact moment India gained independence in 1947, who discovers he has the telepathic ability to hear the thoughts of the one thousand and one other children born within the first hour of India's independence: the other "midnight's children." Mixing historical events and figures with witches, prophecy, and magic, the novel acts as an allegory for India's turbulent history, a coming-of-age tale, and an epic family saga. Hailed by TIME magazine as one of the hundred greatest novels in the English language, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN won the Booker prize in 1981, and also won the "Best of the Booker" prize in both 1993 and 2008, proving its lasting power.
| Praise(unknown)
"In Salman Rushdie, India has produced a glittering novelist--one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling." - V. S. PritchettNew York Review of Books
"An extraordinary novel...one of the most important to come out of the English speaking world in this generation." - Robert Towers New York Times
"We have an epic in our laps. The obvious comparisons are to Gunter Grass in 'The Tin Drum' and to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. I am happy to oblige the obvious....I wish Mr. Rushdie's children, all of them orphans of history, would take over the world at dawn. This novel--exuberant, excessive, despairing--is special." - John Leonard Millennium Whole Earth Catalog
"In 'Midnight's Children', he created a character who is nothing less than India herself, wired telepathically to all the other children born at the very instant when India became a nation, enfolding all contradictions, sinned against and sinning, mad as hell and forgiving all." |
| Author Bio| Salman Rushdie | | Salman Rushdie was born into a wealthy Indian family two months before India gained its independence. His father was educated at Cambridge and, after practicing law, took over the family business of leather and cloth manufacturing. Rushdie has a degree in history, also from Cambridge. He lived in Pakistan after graduation, where his family had moved, but his involvement with a production of Edward Albee's THE ZOO STORY (a play disapproved of by the Muslim government) forced him to return to England. He worked as an actor, then as an advertising copywriter. His first novel was a failure, but his second, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN, won the Booker Prize in 1993 and led to his success. His fourth novel, THE SATANIC VERSES (1988), was banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, and the Arab states, and in 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran proclaimed a fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his death and offering a $2.6 million award for his execution. Rushdie went into hiding under protection from Scotland Yard, and remained largely in seclusion until September 1998, when the fatwa was lifted by a more liberal Iranian regime. Even in hiding, Rushdie continued to write, publishing another novel, a collection of stories, and many essays. In 1994 he was elected president of the newly formed International Parliament of Writers. |
| Awards |
James Tait Black Prize (1981) |  | won, Best Novel | |
The Man Booker Prize (1981) | | won, Fiction | | |
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