Midnight's Children (Hardcover)

Salman Rushdie

ISBN 10: 0679444629 / ISBN 13: 9780679444626

Published by Random House USA Inc, New York, 1995

About this Item

Hardcover. "BEST OF THE BOOKER" AWARD WINNER This towering classic of international literature is at once a riveting family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation. The New York Review of BooksSaleem Sinai, the hero of Midnight's Children, is one of the thousand and one children born in India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the dawn of its independence from British rulethe moment, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when India had her "'tryst with destiny.'" The twists and turns of this destiny form the springboard from which Salman Rushdie launches into his celebrated fantasia of our modernity.At once a fairy tale, a furious political satire, and a meditation on the ways in which time and change both shape and are shaped by the life of a single individual, Midnight's Children announced the triumphant return of epic storytelling to our highly evolved literary tradition. With its central themes of displacement and indeterminacy, and its highly original use of a polyglot vocabulary absorbed form three distinct but overlapping cultures, this book anticipated and to a certain extent defined the multifarious, dislocated, ever-expanding world in which, increasingly, we all live. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and then in 2008 it was named "'The Best of the Booker,'" the best book to have won the prize in the forty years of its existence."Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times. The author of The Stananic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people--a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy. "Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction".--The Philadelphia Inquirer. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679444626

Bibliographic Details

Title: Midnight's Children (Hardcover)

Publisher: Random House USA Inc, New York

Publication Date: 1995

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis:

A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947--and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.

Review:

Before Salman Rushdie had that problem with a certain religious-political figure with a serious need to chill out, he'd already shown he was an important literary force. Quite simply, Midnight's Children is amazing--fun, beautiful, erudite, both fairy tale and political narrative told through a supernatural narrator who is caught between different worlds. Though it's a big book, with big themes of India's nationhood and of ethnic and personal identity, it's far from a dry history lesson. Rushdie tells the story in his own brand of magical realism, with a prose of lyrical, transcendent goofiness.