Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize three times: in 1981 for best novel, and in 1993 and 2008—for the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize—as the best work ever awarded. It is an allegorical novel, a story of post-independence India and the generation born into a free country. It is a myth, a parable, and a phantasmagoria, intertwining the tragic and the comic, satire and pathos, adventure and drama, a multifaceted narrative that tells the life of the protagonist, Salem Sinai, and the history of India and, to some extent, Pakistan from 1910 to 1976.