Midnight’s Children received critical acclaim when first published in 1981.  VS Pritchett’s verdict (in the New Yorker) that, with Midnight’s Children, “India has produced a great novelist… a master of perpetual storytelling”.

Robert Crum, in the Guardian Top 100 Books list published in 2015, called it, “Among the many turning points in the constant remaking of the English novel – the dazzle of Sterne; the quieter, witty genius of Austen; the polyvalent brio of Dickens; the vernacular brilliance of Twain, and so on – the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1981 now stands out as a particularly significant milestone. Salman Rushdie’s second novel took the Indian English novel, revolutionized it by marrying the fiction of Austen and Dickens with the oral narrative tradition of India, and made a “magical realist” (the label was still in its infancy) novel for a new generation. “

In its own time, it has been an acclaimed prizewinner,
winning both the Booker prize in 1981,
and “the Booker of Bookers” in 1993 and again in 2008.

Rushdie writes,

“When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.”

For further information: Contact Event Coordinator Louise DiMattio at ladimat@aol.com or via phone 415.244.2461.