Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #655 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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.

Daily Telegraph, James Walton
'the result is a book that feels not unlike anything written before, but also anything written since...it's exhilirating'

Metro
'a masterpiece of post-colonial literature'

Customer Reviews

The emporer's new clothes....
Having read and enjoyed many of the finest authors of the 19th & 20th century (including many Indian authors) I felt I had to explore Rushdie. What a mistake - pretentious, self-indulgent claptrap.

A book to go in any long or short list of master pieces
What can I say about midnight's children that has not already been said. I would put it on par with one hundred years of solitude. You have to read it to know what I am talking about.

Exciting
Despite what some reviewers have said about this book I must say that I found it easy to get into. The characters are all so beautifully described with such fabulously intriguing details. The settings made me want to go to India. And as a book about India I enjoyed this enormously.
The parts set in Pakistan were more difficult for me. I really would have preferred the character to have stayed in India because I think that the book loses something by being transported suddenly to Pakistan.
I very rarely agree with the Booker Prize as being a good barometer of literary efforts, in fact I can barely think of one book that has won it that I have actually liked, but this book is something different. Perhaps just a bit too much of that 'magical realism' (sorry to people who like that).
A great read, but not perfect.