Published in 2008, the year Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize for fiction, Between the Assassinations is a critically acclaimed bestseller.

Kittur is on India’s south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut—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 journalist dreams of riddance and redemption; 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. What emerges is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Prime Minister 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.