by Salman Rushdie · 1981
Salman Rushdie's magical-realist epic follows Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India's independence in 1947 and endowed, along with the other 1,000 children born in that first hour, with a strange telepathic gift. Saleem's personal history becomes inseparably tangled with the fate of the newly independent nation as he narrates his family's fortunes across Partition, wars, and political upheaval in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Told in a digressive, self-aware voice to his companion Padma, the novel is at once a coming-of-age story, a family saga, and an allegory of a young nation's turbulent growth.