Caste, caste, and more caste. Review to follow soon...

I understand why Aravind Adiga continues to live in Mumbai; he is sitting on an endless mine of literary material that would keep him writing into a ripe old age. Although never advertized as such, this is a collection of short stories connected only by locale, the city of Kittur, a microcosm of Mother India with it all its fables and foibles.And so Adiga takes us on a seven-day tour of Kittur, unearthing its myriad denizens and their bizarre situations: from low castes to Brahmins, violent scho...

The title of "Between the Assassinations" refers to the seven-year period between 1984 -- when Indira Gandhi was assassinated -- and 1991 when her son Rajiv was also killed. Set in India, the book captures a cross-spectrum view of life in a town called Kittur, where the characters include a drug addict's chldren who have to beg to keep up their father's habit; a 29 year old furniture delivery man who realizes that this is his life; a servant to a wealthy man who has no control over her own life;...

Better than White Tiger. I was born in Calicut, north of which this book is based. Some of the tensions and by plays are very familiar and resonate painfully.Brilliant book, makes small town Southern India come alive in a fashion that hasn't been seen in 'Indian literature in English' for a long time. I'm using my words carefully here, there are several brilliant portrayals of Small town India in regional writing in India in several languages - malayalam, tamil, kannada and so on. Several good t...

Short stories - really good. Adiga can make you feel and smell and taste the poverty of India, through description and character, and it ain't pretty. But it's real. Or at least it feels real -- I've never been to India, so what do I know?Heavy on bodily discharges of all sorts; and each seenscene (egads!) drips with almost unbearable heat and humidity. The filth is metaphorical too: corruption, physical pain, disease is everywhere; violence looms (although here, unlike in The White Tiger, it ne...

I really enjoyed this collection of stories set in a fictional southern Indian town, Kittur. The stories are mostly bleak and morose. Adiga's characters face life with the fatalistic belief that nothing will ever change for them. They are stuck in a cycle that they know they will never escape. Some are angry, some are resigned, and some (very few) are hopeful in tone. But the main character, throughout all the stories, is India, in all her guts and glory. While I enjoyed some stories in this col...

Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger won the Booker Prize and was notable for its intriguing form. I thought it would be a hard act to follow. It would need a great writer to be able to make a repeat match of both originality and style with engaging content. So on beginning Between The Assassinations I was prepared to be disappointed. I need not have worried because Aravind Adiga’s 2010 novel is perhaps a greater success than the earlier prize winner.The novel does not have a linear plot, nor does it fea...

I really liked The White Tiger, but I’m a bit disappointed in this, a collection of short stories – written before Adiga won the Booker last year, but not published until afterwards. Publishers sometimes do this with prize-winning authors: they resurrect previously rejected work and rush it out into the bookshops while the author’s high profile guarantees good sales. I have learned the hard way to be suspicious of books published too soon after a big prize by a first-time author. Between the Ass...

A breathtakingly realistic combination of short stories that conspire together to imprint in your mind the story of Kittur in 80s through the army of characters that populate this allegedly fictional town. If you wanna read about the real India, this is the book to go to.

The writing is fast-paced and this is the main reason how I got through this book. There's just a lot of talk about communal clashes and discrimination, corruption and whatever that does not seem right about a restless society. The story has so much to tell but I felt like it didn't have a particular direction to look forward to.The writing accurately presented the stereotypes we have about certain communities, caste discrimination and the political scenario amidst we live in. Content warnings a...

Thank god this is short stories, so I was able to pause between the resounding slap of each delineated life. We know we're privileged, right? Living in India would be pretty bad, "local color" aside, right? If you're white, sitting in an armchair with a computer in front of you, well - you'll never even get close to understanding it. But perhaps you might try, with a book like this.This book is angry like a furnace about caste, baksheesh, poverty and poshlost. It's set in the '80s but clearly, n...

Collection of short stories around a small town Kitur. There is no hero in this story not are villains. There are only characters that you see in your life.The mostly dark face of life that you won't find in a happy go lucky kind of story.

Have read all the 4 books that Arvind Adiga has published till now. But only while reading this, I realised they are all about the class divide + caste divide that largely defines the society's functioning in India. The reason being he is kind of blunt about that fact in this collection of stories.It is a collection of stories - loosely interlinked - set in a small town named Kittur on the south-western coast of India, between the 2 assassinations: that of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv...

Definitely one of the most entertaining and engrossing audiobooks that have livened up my daily commute in the last year. I also loved "The White Tiger" when I read it, but I feel this book provides even more bang-for-the-buck with a relentlessly entertaining series of short stories that work well for someone such as myself looking to digest the material a half-an-hour on the 403 at a time. Mr. Aravind is a talented storyteller and creator of memorable characters, and the narration by Mr. Nayyar...

Between the Assassinations is really good. It's quite a bit different from Adiga's earlier work White Tiger. Though portions of the story are told through first person narration, this book deviates significantly from the formula he very successfully used in the past. The characters in this book never meet. Their only connection is the city in which they live. The novel is told through vignettes which reveal the intricate social and political climates operating in the fictionalized city of Kittur...

I’ve been thinking a lot about this book and I have to say it very much could be the perfect sampler to the Raw experience of Indian Lit..#theguywiththebookreview presents Between The Assassinations by Aravind Adiga..The first book I read by Adiga was the very much critically acclaimed and Man Booker Prize Winner, The White Tiger..Surprisingly this book was actually written by Adiga before that one but published later..Between The Assassinations is a collection of short stories based in Kittur,