Midnight's Children
1981 · 560 pages
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact midnight India becomes independent, which gives him telepathy and welds his life to the country's. Sixty years of history arrive as one unreliable, delighted confession.
★ 8.7
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1981
Showing 12 books from 1981
With the Old Breed
1981 · 352 pages
Sledge fought as a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa, then set down the mud, the maggots, and the looting of corpses. The critic Paul Fussell ranked it with the finest war memoirs.
★ 6.8
The Soul of a New Machine
1981 · 320 pages
Working nights in a Massachusetts basement, a crew of young engineers races to build a new computer in a year, and Kidder catches every argument. Nobody had made engineering a literary subject.
★ 6.8
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1981 · 120 pages
Two brothers spend a morning announcing they will kill Santiago Nasar over their sister's wedding night, and nobody stops them. García Márquez reconstructs it from the witnesses who let it happen.
★ 6.8
Palace of Dreams
1981 · 208 pages
Clerks in an Ottoman ministry collect the dreams of every subject and sift them for the one that foretells the empire's fate. Albania's dictatorship banned it within months, after twenty thousand copies sold.
★ 6.3
After Virtue
1981 · 286 pages
Modern moral argument never ends, MacIntyre says, because we speak in fragments of a tradition we have forgotten. He sent philosophy back to Aristotle's virtues and made ethics a fight about character again.
★ 6.2
Deep Blues
1981 · 310 pages
Palmer traces the blues from Mississippi Delta plantations through Memphis to Chicago's South Side, and he hears exactly what Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters were doing on the strings.
★ 6.1
So Long a Letter
1981 · 96 pages
Widowed after thirty years, a Senegalese teacher writes to her closest friend about the husband who took her daughter's teenage friend as a second wife. It won the first Noma Award.
★ 6.1
The War of the End of the World
1981 · 568 pages
In the Brazilian backlands a wandering preacher gathers thousands of the destitute, and the young republic sends four armies to wipe them out. Vargas Llosa grants every fanatic in it his own reasoning.
★ 5.8
The Breaks of the Game
1981 · 400 pages
One collapsing season with the Portland Trail Blazers, three years after their title, and Halberstam turns it into an anatomy of how television money and race were remaking professional basketball from the inside.
★ 5.6
Sixty Stories
1981 · 451 pages
A balloon settles over forty-five blocks of Manhattan and New Yorkers read meanings into it. Barthelme's deadpan collages taught two generations of American writers that a story need not make ordinary sense.
★ 5.5
A Good Man in Africa
1981 · 342 pages
Morgan Leafy, a British diplomat in a fictional West African state, must bribe an incorruptible Scottish doctor, conceal a venereal infection, and remove the maid lightning killed before the Duchess arrives.
★ 4.7