Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

The White Tiger is a great dry witted first novel which examines Indian social groups and crime levels giving you a sinister and engaging story line all in one vessel. The opinionated narrator talks to you like you're his friend and Adiga's journalist background shines through in his writing style.

You're immediately put in your place about whose eyes you'll be seeing the story unfold through. This teasing plot reveals the confession of a morally challenged rags-to-riches man leaving you gripped and strangely sympathetic at times. Adiga makes his audience feel familiar with his great use of words, 'My belly churned. I thought I would c**p right there, on my seat, on the gearbox.'

Our lead character, Balram Halwai is a man looking up the ladder and attempting to climb it. At first you might think the story will merely portray the struggle and divide between poverty and wealth, but The White Tiger has a bigger picture to paint, one of impatience and desperation leading to dark acts of malice. There's a message beneath the pages for everyone. More thought provoking than didactic, but not a book you'll find easy to put down.

If I were to write a novel, I would write it like this. Aravind Adiga's novel 'The White Tiger' depicts a side of India, Western Society isn't much aware of. It uses the voices of the underbelly classes to illustrate the corruption of Indian politics and government, conveying anger and resentment bubbling low beneath the working classes.

Balram Halwai is a Bangalore entrepreneur and businessman, the young man writes letters to Wen Jiaboa, the Chinese premier. The letters Halwai writes draws upon his own 'rags to riches' story, from being a son of a rickshaw-puller, born and raised in the 'Darkness' of India (one of two parts of India the people who live there call it, the other half being 'the Light'):

'The river brings darkness to India the black river 'everything that is planted in it, suffocating and chocking and stunting it?'The other half being the 'Light,' the richer areas of the country next to the ocean: 'Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well-off'. The narrator belongs to the 'Light' after breaking away from his background from resisting his social positioning he was expected to fulfil but the book carries a dark and murderous plot, making the novel hard to put down.

Thrilling, satirical, political but fiction, giving the reader a real sense of the plot happening as it is credible and realistic.