Midnight's Children
1981 novel by Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children is the second novel by Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie, published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape with cover design by Bill Botten, about India's transition from British colonial rule to independence and partition. It is a postcolonial, postmodern and magical realist story told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, set in the context of historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive. In the way it interweaves a personal with a national biography it has similarities to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.
Midnight's Children sold over one million copies in the UK alone and won the Booker Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. It was also awarded the special Booker of Bookers prize in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008, to celebrate the Booker Prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries. In 2003 the novel appeared at number 100 on the BBC's The Big Read poll which determined the UK's "best-loved novels" of all time.
Background and plot summary
Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in 1947 British Raj India and after the partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when India became an independent country. The novel is divided into three books.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Midnight's Children” is 1981 novel by Salman Rushdie. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Midnight's, Children and novel, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1981 novel by Salman Rushdie” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q625764. VIAF identifies the subject as 174721054. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1993, 2008 and 2003.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Midnight's Children” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.