Between the Assassinations: A Novel in Stories

Adiga, Aravind

ISBN 10: 0743597206 ISBN 13: 9780743597203

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2009

Synopsis

From the New York Times-bestselling winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008 -- a powerful and striking new collection

Welcome to Kittur, India. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed.

A twelve-year-old boy named Ziauddin, a gofer at a tea shop near the railway station, is enticed into wrongdoing because a fair-skinned stranger treats him with dignity and warmth. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. A privileged schoolboy sets off an explosive in a Jesuit-school classroom in protest against casteism. And the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist Party of India falls in love with the one young woman, in the poorest part of town, whom he cannot afford to wed.

A blinding, brilliant, and brave mosaic of Indian life as it is lived in a place called Kittur, Between the Assassinations, with all the humor, sympathy, and unflinching candor of The White Tiger, showcases the most beloved aspects of Aravind Adiga's writing to brilliant effect and enlarges our understanding of the world we live in today.

About this title

About the Author

Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Reviews

Spanning a cast of characters that include street urchins and police inspectors, Harsh Nayyar's voice is as flexible as this narrative on modern life in India from the acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize (THE WHITE TIGER, 2008). Nayyar conveys the weariness of the older characters and the exuberance of the younger characters throughout this novel while at the same time reflecting the class, religious, and ethnic diversity of the world's second-most-populated country. Nayyar's slightly accented speech sounds authentically like the English of India. He manages to keep up with the ambitious novel, which shifts continually as the story embraces an extended cast of characters and time frames, including nostalgic glances backward to the era of Gandhi and the Indian independence movement. M.R. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0743597206
• ISBN 13: 9780743597203
• Binding: Audio CD
• Language: English