Cirrus@Austlit

'A riveting, suspenseful, and exuberant novel from the bestselling, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day about a young illegal immigrant who must decide whether to report crucial information about a murder—and thereby risk deportation.

'Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life.

'But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients—a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.

'Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Set in the small Karnataka town of Kittur, ...Assassinations attempts a portrait of the town and its inhabitants, across class, caste, religion and occupation. Among them are an illiterate Muslim boy who is dazzled by a handsome Islamic terrorist a Dalit bookseller arrested for selling a pirated copy of The Satanic Verses a journalist confronting the yawning gap between what happened during a communal riot and what his newspaper is willing to print and the widow of a farmer who turns in vain to the local Communist leader for help. 'What emerges,' according to the blurb, 'is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi-a time of great transformations.' (Publisher's blurb)