"Midnight's Children"

Before he became known to the world--with the kind of publicity you can't (and wouldn't want to) buy--for having written The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie was known to readers as author of Midnight's Children. The book is surrealist fiction that tracks the history of India from 1910 to the declaration of the Emergency in 1976 through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, when the Partition of India and Pakistan took effect.

Twenty-five years after the publication of Midnight's Children, Rushdie has written a new introduction in which he looks backs on how the novel came about and the reaction that it provoked in people from his father to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Read this new introduction here.

--Marshal Zeringue