Saleem Sinai a nation's history. His life and his experiences in the novel are inseparable from the events taking place around him and so he truly becomes a child of history. A "Times of India" review calls Saleem the most loved of Rushdie's many characters despite, or perhaps because of, his being "the snot-nosed, cucumber-nosed know-all narrator of "Midnight’s Children", whose life swings between exultation and suffering, for he has been 'handcuffed to history', a coupling determined by his time of birth, midnight on August 15, 1947, when 'clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting'". India's national newspaper "The Hindu" noted the success
Salman Rushdie 2005 novel "Shalimar the Clown" received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in the UK, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award. In his 2002 non-fiction collection "Step Across This Line", he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Günter Grass, and James Joyce. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's and praised her highly in the foreword of her collection "Burning your Boats".