Between the Assassinations

‘Fiction at its most ambitious and incisive’ - The Telegraph Kittur, on India’s south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut, is a small, undistinguished everytown. Here, an illiterate Muslim boy working at the train station finds himself tempted by an Islamic terrorist; a Dalit bookseller is arrested for selling a copy of The Satanic Verses; a rich, spoiled, half-caste student decides to explode a bomb in college; a sexologist has to find a cure for a young boy with a mysterious disease that may be AIDS. Across class, religion, occupation and preoccupation, Kittur is mapped through the beauty of the rural, coastal south. What emerges is the moral biography of an Indian town, its pathos, injustices and ironies, in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. With a cartographer’s precision and a novelist’s humanity, Aravind Adiga composes a group portrait of ordinary Indians in a time of extraordinary transformation. Keenly observed and finely detailed, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of the voice and imagination.