The White Tiger: Aravind Adiga (Atlantic Cult Classics)

[An] extraordinary and brilliant first novel... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision. -- Sunday Times Adiga's portrait of the Indian capital is very funny but unmistakably angry... Keeps you guessing to the final page and beyond. -- Financial Times Suffused with mordant wit -- Neel Mukherjee Dazzling -- Independent on Sunday A masterpiece -- The Times Blazingly savage and brilliant -- Sunday Telegraph

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his foetus, but you know his corpse. 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 of 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 cockroaches, call-centres, thirtysix-million gods, slums, shopping malls, and crippling traffic jams, Balram comes to see how the Tiger might slip the bars of his cage.