Crossroads

Title: Between the Assassinations
Author: Aravind Adiga
Publisher: Atlantic Books, UK
Price: £14.99
Pages: 300

Aravind Adiga with brilliant precision, has mapped Kittur, a small town in the south of India, full of fresh humour and wry observation in his book ‘Between the Assassinations.’ The book showcases the class struggle rendered personal; the fury of the underdog and the fire of the iconoclast.

What emerges in the book 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 the cartographer’s precision and the novelist’s humanity, Aravind Adiga composes a group portrait of ordinary Indians in a time of extraordinary transformation.

Adiga’s style unites anger with incapacity. On several occasions, his characters are compared to animals, from the prisoner who leads his captors by the handcuffs, “like a fellow taking two monkeys on a walk”, to a prospective groom who is so deferential he seems “more the family’s domestic pet than the scion”.

In the words of The Guardian, “Between the Assassinations shows that Adiga...is one of the most important voices to emerge from India in recent years.”

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