Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie is one of the great works of contemporary fiction in English
Rushdie's fantastical tale of a young man born at the precise moment of India's independence is part magic realism, part historical fiction
"I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time." And so begins Midnight's Children, one of the English language's great works of contemporary fiction, written by a strange, brilliant and complex author who, for the best part of his career, has pursued the twin principles of free speech and artistic expression - often at a price.
The trouble started in 1989, the year Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against the Anglo-Indian writer for what was perceived to be a slight on the Prophet Mohammed and Islam as depicted in his novel The Satanic Verses, which had been published the previous year. The intense, Booker prize-winning author became an international news item and a wanted man overnight.
Eight years before, in 1981, the situation was markedly different. Rushdie was the darling of the media world, having impressed with this fantastical tale of a young man born at the precise moment of India's independence and with it the violent partition of the country.
Part magic realism, part historical fiction, the story is held together by many harsh contrasts: secularism and religion, old and new, East and West, India and Pakistan. The narrator and protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is no normal child. With his cucumber-like nose and fierce blue eyes, he is one of 1,001 "midnight children", all of whom possess magical powers. For Saleem it is the ability to hear other people's thoughts.
The weight of history bears down upon the young boy, whose arrival is heralded by the media as an extremely significant moment in the unwritten history of the new India. Saleem takes the story back to Kashmir in 1915, and the meeting between his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, a doctor, and his future grandmother, Naseem.