Salman Rushdie’s tragicomic tale is very much of our deranged time, but was inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote.
Saleem’s life is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible, in Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece.
Born at midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences for which Saleem is not prepared: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ - all born in the initial hour of India’s independence - and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out danger imperceptible to others.
Salman Rushdie
About the Author
Salman Rushdie has been nominated for the Booker Prize seven times, winning in 1981, and was knighted for services to literature in 2007.Listen to an extract from Midnight's Children
The BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Midnight’s Children stars Preeya Kalidas, Nikesh Patel and more.
Penguin Books UK · Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Audio Extract)
What makes it so vertiginously exciting a reading experience, is the way it takes in not just the whole apple cart of India and the problem of being a novel about India but also...the business of being a novel at all
Midnight's Children on screen
Salman Rushdie narrated the film adaptation of Midnight’s Children, which was released in 2012.
The Times of India said the film was a love letter to India, and wrote that it ‘moves you with its heart and words, especially when Rushdie murmurs, “Without passport or permit, in a basket of invisibility, I returned - to my India.”’
The film was directed by Deepa Mehta (who also wrote the screenplay with Rushdie) and starred Rajat Kapoor, Shriya Saran, Satya Bhabha, Anita Majumdar, Siddharth and more.
Satya Bhabha and Shriya Saran in Midnight’s Children.
© E1 ENTERTAINMENT / AA Film Archive / Alamy Stock PhotoA world was created full of clamour and scent, food smells, flowers and colour. I can still remember the thrill of its magic, the nosebleed turning to rubies on the page.
— Helena Kennedy
Video highlights
What the Booker Prize Book Club said
‘I would challenge anyone to be able to put the novel down during the birth of Ganesh scene in the chapter titled ‘A Wedding’ near the novel’s end. This is writing that stuns you with its brilliance. After I’d finished the chapter I had a tea break and as I flicked on the kettle, reeling from what I’d just read, I started chuckling to myself as that question from above came thunderingly into my head: how? HOW has he written this book?
The last 100 pages of this novel are simply beguiling, not often does a novel give you this level of payoff in such a sustained way: we have a birth scene, the destruction of a magicians’ slum with Saleem’s captivity by the state’s ruthless acolytes, and then a dénouement full of glorious humanity.’
Kenneth Williams, The Booker Prize Book Club
The Booker Prize Book Club
Other nominated books by Salman Rushdie
East meets West in a blaze of glory in Salman Rushdie’s masterful, magical story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world.
A killing in Los Angeles has its roots in a shattered paradise halfway across the globe, in Salman Rushdie’s inventive and powerful fiction.
Salman Rushdie asks what we do when the world’s walls - its family structures, its value-systems, its political forms - start to crumble.
Salman Rushdie’s magical realist epic. Hugely complex and multilayered, it remains one of the most controversial books in recent literary history.
Salman Rushdie combines magic realism with a fierce rivalry to illustrate his central theme - that shame begets violence and violence begets shame.
