Aravind Adiga

No saris. No scents. No spices. No music. No lyricism. No illusions. This is India now. Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life-having nothing but his own wits to help him along. Born in a village in the dark heart of India, Balram gets...

Manjunath Kumar is fourteen and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket--if not as good as his older brother Radha. But there are many other things about himself and the world that he doesn't know. Sometimes it even seems as though everyone has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself. And when Manju meets Radha's great rival, a mysterious Muslim boy privileged and confident in all the ways Manju is not, he is forced...

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...

Presents a collection of short stories describing life in the Indian city of Kittur between the time of the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991.