Book review of Between The Assassinations - by Aravind Adiga

A critic who has read the manuscript of ...Assassinations feels it is 'more raw, less self-conscious and perhaps more nuanced than The White Tiger'. Come November, when the book will be published in India, and we'll know if Adiga's actual first novel, rather than his first-published one, would have been a more worthy contender for the Booker.
Between the Assassinations is a collection of short stories and is being published by Picador in India. It will hit stores in India on the first of November. Between the Assassinations is redolent. It glistens with the beauty of the rural, coastal south where it is set. Its subject is the pathos, injustices and ironies of Indian life. The book will have a print run of 16,000 copies, which is on the higher side for fiction in India.
Set in the small Karnataka town of Kittur, ...Assassinations attempts a portrait of the town and its inhabitants, across class, caste, religion and occupation. Among them are an illiterate Muslim boy who is dazzled by a handsome Islamic terrorist a Dalit bookseller arrested for selling a pirated copy of The Satanic Verses a journalist confronting the yawning gap between what happened during a communal riot and what his newspaper is willing to print and the widow of a farmer who turns in vain to the local Communist leader for help. 'What emerges,' according to the blurb, 'is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi-a time of great transformations.'