White Tiger

Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi behind the wheel of a Honda. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls, and the crippling traffic jams, Balram learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. Driven by desire to better himself, he comes to see how the Tiger might escape his cage... "'[An] extraordinary and brilliant first novel... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision.' Sunday Times * "[A] blazingly savage and brilliant first novel... Not a single detail in this novel rings false or feels confected. The White Tiger is an excoriating piece of work, stripping away the veneer of 'India Rising'... That it also manages to be suffused with mordant wit, modulating to clear-eyed pathos, means Adiga is going places as a writer." - Neel Mukherjee, Sunday Telegraph * "Unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the country as seen from the bottom of the heap; there's not a sniff of saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere. [Adiga's hero] is an enticing figure... Even more impressive is the nitty-gritty of Indian life that Adiga unearths the corruption, the class system, the sheer petty viciousness... You'll read it in a trice and find yourself gripped." - Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times * "Extraordinary and brilliant... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision... The voice of Halwai - witty, pithy, ultimately psychopathic... [is] remarkable." - Adam Lively, Sunday Times"