The White Tiger

Meet Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’: servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer.   Balram 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 escape.   When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi at the wheel of a Honda.   Amid today’s India’s cockroaches and call-centres, its 36,000,004 gods, slums, shopping malls, and 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 . . . through murder.

About Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras in 1974 and was raised in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Book Prize for 2008. A former Indian correspondent for Time magazine, his writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Financial Times and the Sunday Times, among other publications. He lives in Mumbai.

Price: AUD$24.95. Publisher: ATLANTIC. 336pp. May 2009

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