Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of India's independence, and his life is handcuffed to history. Rushdie wrote this in a torrent of invention, mixing Bombay slang with magic realism, family saga with national epic. The prose is maximalist, exuberant, sometimes overwhelming. The novel won the Booker Prize and then the Booker of Bookers. Rushdie would later face a fatwa for another book, but this one made him famous, made Indian writing in English a global phenomenon. Saleem's nose is enormous, his memory unreliable, his country impossible and real.