Midnight's Children is a grand book, in the ambition and the scope of its subject, and in the daring and dynamism of its method. It is also an intimate book, attentive to childhood memories of people and neighbourhoods. In both these respects, subject and method, the novel has sources which influenced and informed its construction, and these will be discussed in more detail below. One of them is the novel The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, first published in German in 1959. In 1985, Rushdie paid this tribute to Grass and to the novel:

This was four years after the publication and great triumph of his own Midnight's Children, a novel which demonstrates the daring that Rushdie claims Grass inspired in him, and which in its own right has inspired a generation of Indian writers. Midnight's Children is now a central text in the study of the postcolonial phenomenon in writing in English, and has engaged the attention of scholars and critics, as well as the general student of literature.