Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

At the precise instant India wins its freedom, just past midnight on the fifteenth of August, a baby tumbles into the world handcuffed to history, and the clocks, Saleem Sinai swears, joined their palms in salute. He is one of 1,001 children born in that first enchanted hour, each one gifted, and Saleem, blessed with the most enormous and leaking of noses, can gather them all inside his head: a telepathic parliament of every future India might have been. Years later, cracking apart and pickling his memories in a Bombay factory while his lover Padma begs him to hurry, he tells the impossible thing in one torrential rush of clause upon clause, as if the subcontinent were trying to speak at once. _Midnight's Children_ is the rare book that swallows a nation whole and never stops being funny, tender, and heartbroken. When the Emergency comes for the children one by one and their gifts go dark, you feel what Saleem has known since the clocks saluted him: a self and a nation can be the same wound, and bleed together.