Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008

Winner of the Galaxy Author of the Year award 2009.

Aravind Adiga's winning debut novel The White Tiger is described as a ‘compelling, angry and darkly humorous' novel about a man's journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success. It was described by one reviewer as an ‘unadorned portrait' of India seen ‘from the bottom of the heap'.

Abridged audio edition.

Read by Kerry Shale.

5 CDs
Running Time: 6 hours

Synopsis

Meet Balram Halwal, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells his story…

Born in a village in the dark heart of India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coal and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape of breaking away from the banks Mother Ganga, into whose murky depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.

His big chance comes when a rich village landlord hires him as a chauffeur for his son, daughter-in-law, and their two Pomeranian dogs. From behind the wheel of a Honda, Balram first sees Delhi. The city is a revelation. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls and the crippling traffic jams, Balram's re-education begins. Caught between his instinct to be a loyal son and servant, and his desire to better himself, he learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. As the other servants flick through the pages of Murder Weekly, Balram begins to see how the Tiger might escape his cage. For surely any successful man must spill a little blood on his way to the top?

THE WHITE TIGER is a take of two Indias. Balram's journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.

Reviews

"The must have audio this month - a tale of two Indias: the rich and the poor, the light and the dark." DAILY EXPRESS
 
"Balram's rise from rickshaw-puller's son to mega-successful Bangalore entrepreneur is a psychological crime thriller stuffed with uncomfortable insights into the ugly underbelly of India's political and social divisions ... Brilliantly savage." OBSERVER
 
"Moving, illuminating, funny and shocking, and written with huge measures of heart and intellect, Adiga's novel was a worthy winner of last year's Man Booker prize." SUNDAY TIMES
 
"I'm now going to say how brilliantly Kerry Shale reads the new Man Booker prize winner about a ruthless rickshaw-puller's son. ..He's ruthless, but he's also hugely engaging and, most of all, funny. Shale's accent doesn't detract, it enhances. It's what good audiobooks are all about."  Sue Arnold,  GUARDIAN
 
"On the page, this novel is a worthy winner of the Man Booker prize ... yet it ups its game a thousandfold when read by the truly phenomenal Kerry Shale. It's near impossible to believe that one person could bring a cast of magnificently various Indian voices so raucously to life. But he does. It is a tour de force." Sue Gaisford,  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

About the Author

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras in 1974 and was raised in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities. A former correspondent in India for Time magazine, his articles have also appeared in publications like the Financial Times, the Independent, and the Sunday Times. He lives in Mumbai. The White Tiger is his first novel.   Author photo © Mark Pringle More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation