Showing results for "Midnight Hour" in World Literature

Seven months ago, our family left suburban Connecticut for my parents’ isolated lake house in a naïve attempt to reconnect. Life had imploded, or so I thought then. I hoped the change would reset us: a montage of Hallmark moments—card games in candlelight, spontaneous hugs and important, healing chats. What I got was a nuclear holocaust five days after we arrived. A week ago, the lake house burned to the ground. Our last place of safety. Now, I watch my children huddle together, their faces lit up by our tiny campfire beneath the towering blackness of endless pine forests.

Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of midnight on 14th-15th August 1947, at the exact moment that India and Pakistan become separate, independent nations. From that moment on, his fate is mysteriously handcuffed to the history of his country. But Saleem's story starts almost 30 years earlier, when his grandfather, Dr Aadam Aziz, falls in love with a woman concealed behind a perforated sheet. That pivotal moment in Kashmir in 1919 sparks a series of bizarre events that will lead to the birth of a boy with an extraordinary destiny.

In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners' bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar.