Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children is the second novel by the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie, published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape with a cover design by Bill Botten. It concerns India's transition from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of the country.

The story is narrated by Saleem Sinai in a self-reflexive way, mixing invented personal history with actual events. Saleem is born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, exactly as old as independent India, and he later learns that every child born in that first hour received a power of their own. He becomes the telepathic conduit for a Midnight Children's Conference, and the novel is divided into three books.

It sold over a million copies in the United Kingdom alone. It won the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981, and was later awarded the special Booker of Bookers prize in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008, marking the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries of the award. In 2003 the novel appeared on the BBC's The Big Read poll, and it was included in Penguin's list of great books of the twentieth century.