Rushdie Midnights Children jacket

Midnight’s Children is twinned with Tristram Shandy

Vintage Classics competition twins Sterne and Rushdie novels

13 September 2007

At the beginning of August the Man Booker Prize website launched a Vintage Classics competition, asking readers to decide on the best pre-twentieth-century classic novel to twin with Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

Several competition entrants suggested the same novel as a twin for Rushdie’s Midnight Children – Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy – the first volumes of which were published in 1759.

Winner Richard Trama from New Jersey gave the best reason for these two novels being twinned explaining:

‘Both novels are family sagas, both novels stake out territory that is relatively new to the time period of the novel… both novels have narrators struggling with their eras, their geographies, their moments in history. Both novels have parents and other characters are who are integral to a majority of the saga, who are richly developed and important to the overall novel. Both novels have protagonists who want so much to tell things but cannot tell those things so easily that their stories are “straightforward”. Consequently, the comic aspects of each novel propel the audience to read on, to pursue the heroes’ lives as much as the heroes pursue their own lives.’

Trama goes on to admit that, ‘This volume would be a lengthy one in the Vintage Classic Twin series, but, well worth its weight in story, style, and impact.’

Liz Foley, Vintage Classics Editorial Director, commented:

‘Tristram Shandy and Midnight’s Children would make a wonderfully imaginative Vintage Classic Twin and Richard’s explanation shows how much there is to enjoy in both these books.’

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers’ Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s 25-year history.

Richard Trama will receive all twenty books in the Vintage Classic Twins set (full list here).

The Man Booker Prize Fiction at its finest