Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

India celebrated its independence from the British Empire shortly after midnight on August 15, 1947. No, Salman Rushdie wasn’t born on that precise day and hour—he arrived on the scene 57 days earlier, the son of a middle-class Muslim family in Mumbai. But Rushdie's most famous protagonist, Saleem Sinai takes his first breath at the very moment of his n…