Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize for this novel, which follows the lives of children born on August 15, 1947, the day India became an independent nation. The book is simultaneously the story of one boy's coming of age, a chronicle of the growing pains of the new nation, and a family drama, all told in a magical-realist style that manages to be humorous and hopeful despite the gravity of the events depicted.