There’s no question that Salman Rushdie is a ridiculously good writer. However, I have to say that it took me a looooong time to get through this – well over a month and a half, when usually I can finish a book within a couple of weeks. Very well written book – fantastical, complex, entertaining – but also very wordy.

Midnight’s Children is the pseudo-autobiography of Saleem Sinai, the first baby born in independent India. Saleem tells the story of his life, as enmeshed in the history of the first 31 years of post-colonial India and entwined in the lives of the other 1,000 children born between midnight and 1:00 a.m. on the first day of the new country. Saleem describes this complicated, vivid, magical, funny, and disturbing mix as the “chutnification of history.”

This was the first novel Salman Rushdie wrote and the first of his that I have read. I could kick myself for waiting so long. This book is a delight.