Cirrus@Austlit

'SYDNEY IS CHOKING in Aravind Adiga's Amnesty, the sky "darkened by a film of windborne woodsmoke" that has coiled its way down from a bushfire in the Blue Mountains. The smoke is a grey wraith, haunting the city, triggering fire alarms in shops and houses as it sweeps across the harbour. It is a quiet background detail in Adiga's fourth novel. But as Australia burns, it feels consequential: not prescience so much as a kind of monstrous inevitability. With Amnesty, Adiga captures the breathless grief of stepping into a future that has already been written. It is equal parts elegy and indictment.' (Introduction)