Key themes
- Individual and national identity
- History as chaos and coincidence
- Memory as an act of creation
About this book
A boy born at the stroke of India's independence is mystically tied to the nation's fate; exuberant and sprawling.
Published in 1981, Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize and the 'Booker of Bookers' — the best Booker winner of the prize's first 25 years.
Discussion questions
- Saleem's narrative is unreliable — he admits errors and contradictions. What is Rushdie saying about the relationship between personal memory and official history?
- The children born at the moment of Indian independence are connected by their powers. What does this metaphor allow the novel to explore about the relationship between the individual and the nation?
- The novel is exuberant, crowded and digressive. How did you respond to this style — as richness, as chaos, as both?
- Saleem insists his fate and India's are intertwined — but does the novel support this, or does it gently undercut his grandiosity?
- The nose — Saleem's defining physical feature — plays an unexpectedly large symbolic role. What do you make of Rushdie's choice to make the physical so central to a novel about history and memory?
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