Aravind Adiga plots speedy Booker follow-up
Alison Flood writing in guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 March 2009

Aravind Adiga. Photograph: Mark Pringle

Aravind Adiga's second work of fiction, which he wrote in parallel with his Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger, will be published this July, his publisher Atlantic Books has announced. Between the Assassinations, which is already a bestseller in India, is a collection of overlapping stories charting the lives of the residents of a fictional Indian town over the seven-year period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv.

Adiga's debut The White Tiger, which exposes the underbelly of modern India through the eyes of corrupt businessman Balram, was the surprise winner of last year's Booker prize. It saw off competition from Philip Hensher, Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh to take the award and was described by chair of judges Michael Portillo as "a book on the cutting edge", set apart by its originality, which managed to "knock [his] socks off".

Between the Assassinations maps the lives of the people who live in the fictional south western town of Kittur, between Goa and Calicut, from an illiterate Muslim boy who finds himself tempted by an Islamic terrorist, to a bookseller who is arrested for selling The Satanic Verses, and a student who decides to explode a bomb in school. The stories "fit together like jigsaw pieces so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts", said Adiga's editor Ravi Mirchandani, whose track record as a publisher includes Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.

Mirchandani said the new book, which also includes extracts from an imagined travel guide to the town of Kittur in between each section, shares many concerns with The White Tiger, including "corruption, and the limited horizons of people from certain backgrounds".
"They are different approaches to similar material," he continued. The White Tiger "is a novel from the point of view of one narrator, who may or may not be reliable ... The new book has a dozen characters, from little children to old people, from a variety of castes and religions – it has a richness to it that the first novel was not attempting to achieve."
An abridged version of one of the stories, The Sultan's Battery, appeared in the Guardian last October.