Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
grew up in the UK, but my heritage is from the subcontinent. At the age of 23, I went to India to work. I was puttering around a small bookshop in Mumbai. I’d never heard of it. When I read it, I was instantly taken by the narrative about India’s independence struggle. You would think, as someone with that heritage, I would know, but I didn’t. It gave me a solid grounding in the history I would eventually write about in the crime novels, which are set in 1950s India just after independence and partition.
