Midnight's Children (83 page)
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Authors: Salman Rushdie
Published to enormous acclaim in 1981,
Midnight's Children
is the story of Saleem's fate, linked inextricably to that of his country by the accidental timing of his birth. Narrated with sheer stylistic brilliance, it unfurls the myriad joys, dramas, and catastrophes both major and minor of the people of India, both real and imagined. Saleem communicates with 1,000 other “midnight's children” – born auspiciously between twelve and one a.m. on that same night – as the nation descends into Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency. War, colonialism, several family sagas, and religion all intertwine in this shining epic of a novel, while time ticks by and the children approach their futures. Comic, ebullient, and fantastic, this is a book of wild inventiveness and imagination – a landmark work from one of the great writers of our time.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright ©1981 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House Trade Paperbacks and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group Limited, London: Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1981, and reprinted by Penguin Books in 1991.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rushdie, Salman.
Midnight’s children: a novel/by Salman Rushdie.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74411-1
I.Title.
[PR.9499.3.R8M5 1991]
823’.914-dc20 90-38447