A Booker Prize winning, enormous novel about India’s independence, the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the violent political events since 1947, told through the memoir of Saleem Sinai, a Muslim living in India, born at the stroke of midnight on Independence Day in August 1947. Saleem’s rich life is full of improbable but believable characters and events, i.e., he is switched at birth with the newborn product of a British expatriate and a street singer’s wife. His physical traits, weird family, strange history, etc. contribute to a Dickensian novel of Modern India.