The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga Paperback Book

Details

Rent The White Tiger

Author: Aravind Adiga

Format: Quality Paperback, Unabridged-CD, Unabridged-MP3

Publisher: Free Press

Published: Oct 2008

Genre: Fiction - Literary

Retail Price: $17.99

Pages: 304

Synopsis

Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen.

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 the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly ('Love -- Rape -- Revenge!'), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive.

Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers; the prostitutes and the worshippers; the ancient and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations.

Sold in sixteen countries around the world, The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation -- and a startling, provocative debut.

View descriptions at Amazon.com

Recommended

Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson

Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and...

The Elegance of the...
by Muriel Barbery

The enthralling international bestseller. We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renee, the...

The Brief Wondrous Life...
by Junot Diaz

The most talked about—and praised—first novel of 2007, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd...

The Guernsey Literary and...
by Mary Ann Shaffer

January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so...

Light on Snow
by Anita Shreve

A brilliant and beautiful contemporary novel about love and memory from the author of the bestselling novels All He Ever Wanted and The Pilots...

Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen

Jacob Jankowski, 90 years old and living in a nursing home, tells how, orphaned and penniless during the Great Depression, he became an animal trainer...

Nineteen Minutes
by Jodi Picoult

Best known for tackling controversial issues through richly told fictional accounts, Jodi Picoult's 14th novel, Nineteen Minutes, deals with the...

The Road (Oprah's Book...
by Cormac McCarthy

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing...

Reviews