Selection Day - Softcover

Adiga, Aravind

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509806482 ISBN 13: 9781509806485

Publisher: Picador, 2016

Synopsis

BY THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE WHITE TIGER

'The most exciting novelist writing in English today' A. N. Wilson

Manjunath Kumar is fourteen. He knows he is good at cricket - if not as good as his elder brother Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling and is fascinated by the world of CSI and by curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn't know . . . Sometimes it seems as though everyone around him has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself.

When Manju begins to get to know Radha's great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as Manju is not, everything in Manju's world begins to change and he is faced with decisions that will challenge both his sense of self and of the world around him . . .

About this title

Review:

Selection Day is at its heart an engrossing and nuanced coming-of-age-novel . . . intriguing and subtly developed . . . [Adiga] has succeeded in composing a powerful individual story that, at the same time, does justice to life's (and India's) great indeterminacies. (Sunday Times)

[A] finely told, often moving, and intelligent novel . . . Adiga's novel takes in class, religion and sexuality - all issues that disrupt the dream of a sport that cares for nothing but talent and temperament. Because Adiga is a novelist, and one who has grown in his art since his Booker prizewinning debut, The White Tiger, he knows how to talk about all these matters through his characters and their compelling stories. (Kamila Shamsie Guardian)

[Adiga] has always been drawn to that gap between the glitter and gleam of India Shining and the violence, inequality and social misery that give a partial lie to the nation's desire to rebrand itself . . . [he] has written another snarling, witty state-of-the-nation address about a country in thrall to values that 19th-century moralists would have damned as "not cricket". (Observer)

Top-rate fiction from a young master . . . Adiga's plot is gripping. (Times)

Nobody can write with such dark wit about the story the social tumult of contemporary India like Aravind Adiga, who won the Booker prize for his 2008 debut, The White Tiger . . . Four years on, his characters' voices still jump off the page. (GQ)

What makes Selection Day special beyond its journalistic achievements is its sure sense of the eroticism of the locker room. Stripped of his cricketing whites and chest guard, the sportsman is at risk of exposing his heart . . . Never predictable, never simple and never consoling. (Literary Review)

[Selection Day] brings Mumbai to life . . . Adiga handles painful subjects - abuse, violence, corruption - with sensitivity and dazzling flashes of black humour. (Daily Telegraph)

Adiga excels . . . [He] has written another snarling, witty state-of-the-nation address about a country in thrall to values that 19th-century moralists would have damned as "not cricket". (Sukhdev Sandhu Guardian)

Adiga's novels . . . get better and better . . . The social, economic, and environmental preoccupations readers have come to expect of him take [Selection Day] to another level of enlightenment (Sydney Morning Herald)

A well-observed, compulsively readable story of adolescence and ambition, fathers and sons and India today. (Tatler)

From the Author:

Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Madras (now Chennai) and grew up in Mangalore in the south of India. He was educated at Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College, Oxford. His articles have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Times of India. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2008. His second novel, Last Man in Tower, was published in 2011. Praise for Aravind Adiga: 'Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision' Sunday Times 'Blazingly savage and brilliant ... Not a single detail in this novel rings false or feels confected' Neel Mukherjee on The White Tiger, Sunday Telegraph 'Adiga achieves in a dozen pages what many novels fail to do in hundreds: convincingly render individual desire, disappointment and survival ... Between the Assassinations commands attention from beginning to end' San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1509806482
• ISBN 13: 9781509806485
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352