Selection Day: Aravind Adiga - Softcover

Adiga, Aravind

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509806490 ISBN 13: 9781509806492

Publisher: Picador, 2017

Synopsis

Selection Day is a captivating, witty novel by the Man Booker Prize winning author of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga.

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

One of the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2017"

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 . . . Gripping. (Times)

Selection Day is a captivating and sensitive coming-of-age story . . . Adiga's characters are getting more complex with each book, and this complexity makes his indictment of the contemporary world all the more urgent and convincing. (Hirsh Sawhney TLS)

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'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)

Book Description:

A moving and beautifully observed novel, of adolescence, ambition and self-realization, of fathers and sons, set in contemporary Bombay, by the Man Booker Prize winning author of The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1509806490
• ISBN 13: 9781509806492
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352