Eight years before he went into hiding author Salman Rushdie was enjoying the critical success of his second published novel, Midnight’s Children. In A Time To Be Born, Joanna Scutts explains that Rushdie’s voice, and what it stands for, emerged with this semi-autobiographical work that is set in the early years of India’s independence. It was a book that one critic claimed sounded like “a continent finding its voice.” Scutts writes that “especially in the Internet Age, when boundaries and affiliations can transcend national borders, we are all Rushdie’s children now.”

Joanna Scutts was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society and is the author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (Liveright/ W.W. Norton, November 2017).