ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) won the Booker McConnell Prize for 1981, the james Tait Black Memorial Prize and the English-Speaking Union Literary Award. A fecund, dynamic, baroque, transformative fable of memory and politics – ‘a commingling of the improbable and the mundane’ – the book has been equally acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the subcontinent. 250,000 words long, it has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in this country alone, and has been translated into twelve languages. After the critical unsuccess of his first novel, Grimus (1975), Rushdie ‘went for broke’ in reclaiming India for himself in his ‘great, encapsulating’ comic epic: ‘There were times’, he has admitted, ‘when I was convinced that I was mad.’
