Remember that writer who had a fatwa issued against him by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini? Yup, that's the Indian-English writer Salman Rushdie.

In case you were wondering, a fatwa is a religious edict, and in this case, the Ayatollah decided that a book Rushdie wrote called The Satanic Verses was disrespectful to the Prophet Muhammad, so the Ayatollah basically told people that killing Rushdie would be an awesome thing to do. Thanks to the Ayatollah, Rushdie had to live in hiding for ten years.

Rushdie is probably best known because of the fatwa, but he's a super important postcolonial writer, too. And it's not actually because of The Satanic Verses; it's because of another novel—one he wrote before The Satanic Verses—called Midnight's Children.

Midnight's Children (1980)

Midnight's Children made Rushdie into a superstar. It tells the story of Saleem Sinai, a big-nosed man who is born at the exact moment—like, down to the minute—of India's independence in 1947. Because he's born at the same moment as the new nation, his fate becomes entangled with it.

Magical realism, crazy narrative techniques, history, drama: it's all in there. Maybe that's not a surprise, given that this is a novel that re-writes almost the whole of 20th century Indian history from Saleem's. It's a big book, and it's got all the big postcolonial themes, from colonialism to nationalism to history.

Shame (1983)

Rushdie wrote this one after Midnight's Children (and before The Satanic Verses), and it picks up on a lot of the postcolonial themes found in Midnight's Children. This time, the focus of the novel isn't India, but Pakistan, which used to be a part of India before partition in 1947. You can probably guess by the title of the novel that it isn't about pretty things. It's pretty much about how it all went wrong in Pakistan after partition.