BETWEEN THE ASSASSINATIONS

BETWEEN THE ASSASSINATIONS ARAVIND ADIGA

Published in 2008, the year Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize for fiction, Between the Assassinations is a critically acclaimed bestseller. Kittur is on India’s south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut—a small, undistinguished everytown. Here, an illiterate Muslim boy working at the train station finds himself tempted by an Islamic terrorist; a Dalit bookseller is arrested for selling a copy of The Satanic Verses; a rich, spoiled, half-caste student decides to explode a bomb in college; a journalist dreams of riddance and redemption; a sexologist has to find a cure for a young boy with a mysterious disease that may be AIDS. Across class, religion, occupation and preoccupation, Kittur is mapped. What emerges is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Prime Minister Gandhi and her son Rajiv. With a cartographer’s precision and a novelist’s humanity Aravind Adiga composes a group portrait of ordinary Indians in a time of extraordinary transformation. Keenly observed and finely detailed, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of the voice and imagination.

ARAVIND ADIGA

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford Universities. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize for 2008. A former correspondent for Time magazine, his writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Financial Times and the Sunday Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.