About The Book

From the bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day, Aravind Adiga, comes the story of an undocumented immigrant who becomes the only witness to a crime and must face an impossible moral dilemma."Adiga is a novelist . . . one who has grown in his art since his Booker Prize-winning debut, The White Tiger." Kamila Shamsie, Guardian"... displays [Adiga's] greatest gifts as a postcolonial novelist." Dwight Gartner, New York TimesDanny – Dhananjaya Rajaratnam – is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal Australian life.But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognizes a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients ― a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.

Reviews

“Adiga is a novelist . . . one who has grown in his art since his Booker Prize-winning debut, The White Tiger.” Kamila Shamsie, Guardian

‘[Adiga] is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker, a skeptic, a wily entertainer, a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and cant . . . Adiga . . . displays what might be his greatest gifts as a postcolonial novelist: His strong sense of how the world actually works, and his ability to climb inside the minds of characters from vastly different social strata’Dwight Garner, New York Times

“Adiga is a real writer – that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision.”Sunday Times

“The most exciting novelist writing in English today.” A. N. Wilson

“A mesmerising, breakneck quest of a novel; a search for the true sense of self, for the answer to a moral dilemma which damns either way. The scope and profundity of Victor Hugo, the humour and wit we’ve come to expect from Adiga, and a novel which suggests the impossibility of keeping a sense of the self in a globalised world which either forces assimilation or exile.” Andrew Mcmillan

“I like to read Adiga’s novels almost as much as the poet James Dickey liked to drink. He has more to say than most novelists, and about 50 more ways to say it . . . Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul . . . Reading him you get a sense of having your finger on the planet’s pulse… This novel has a simmering plot . . . [but] you come to this novel for other reasons, notably for its author’s authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants’ lives . . . Keep reading.” New York Times

About The Author

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras in 1974. He studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker 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.