A moving and beautifully observed new 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.
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
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.
*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".
*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*
Aravind Adiga’s enthralling Selection Day studies, with
universalizing insight, two brothers from Mumbai consecrated to
cricket at psychic cost
*Times Literary Supplement*
Ambitious, original and morally serious . . . a moving, unsettling
and absorbing story of aspiration and its discontents in
contemporary urban India . . . Much more than just a cricket book,
Selection Day is one of the finest novels written about the game,
combining astute judgements with accounts of individual innings
marked by an unobtrusive lyricism . . . Adiga has often been
compared, most notably with Last Man in Tower, to Charles Dickens,
but Selection Day is reminiscent of a very different Victorian
novelist: Thomas Hardy . . . there is never any doubt of its tragic
resolution; yet it loses none of its emotional force . . .
Selection Day is written at an angle to conventional realism; Adiga
does not construct the illusion that we see this world through the
eyes of his characters. We see it through the author's eyes, and
what emerges most powerfully, as with Hardy, is the author's own
personality: the force of his humanity and his social and political
vision . . . In the quarter-century since liberalisation, urban
India has seen more social and economic change and upheaval than in
entire centuries. To a remarkable and depressing extent, Indian
fiction in English has failed to reckon with this change. For the
third book running, Adiga rises to the challenge with a novel of
ambition, originality, moral seriousness and sociological insight.
To use an analogy appropriate to a novel about batsmanship: where
so many of his peers are content to safely nudge ones and twos,
Adiga remains willing to take risks in the pursuit of fours and
sixes.
*The Hindu*
Selection Day is a captivating and sensitive coming-of-age story
that tackles various new themes: the confounding nature of
sexuality; the darkness that accompanies excellence and achievement
. . . Adiga’s characters, like his settings, are getting more
complex with each book, and this complexity makes his indictment of
the contemporary world all the more urgent and convincing.
*Times Literary Supplement*
I also enjoyed and admired Aravind Adiga’s funny and touching
Selection Day in which cricketing prodigies in Mumbai face googlies
from both bowlers and life
*Spectator*
The best novel I read this year . . . In its primal triangle of
rival brothers and a maniacal father, hell-bent on success in
cricket in India, Adiga grips the passions while painting an
extraordinary panorama of contemporary sports, greed, celebrity,
and mundanity. As a literary master, Adiga has only advanced in his
art since his Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger.
*Atlantic*
Supplies further proof that [Adiga's] Booker Prize . . . was no
fluke. He is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker,
a skeptic, a wily entertainer, a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and
cant . . . Adiga . . . again displays what might be his greatest
gifts as a postcolonial novelist: His strong sense of how the world
actually works, and his ability to climb inside the minds of
characters from vastly different social strata . . . What this
novel offers is the sound of a serious and nervy writer working at
near the top of his form. Like a star cricket batter, Mr. Adiga
stands and delivers, as if for days.
*New York Times*
Adiga’s wit and raw sympathy will carry uninitiated readers beyond
their ignorance of cricket . . . Adiga’s paragraphs bounce along
like a ball hit hard down a dirt street . . . Adiga’s voice is so
exuberant, his plotting so jaunty, that the sadness of this story
feels as though it is accumulating just outside our peripheral
vision
*Washington Post*
A master class in integrating character . . . Peppered with dashes
of humor, this dark and unflinching story is an unqualified
triumph.
*Booklist (starred review)*
Capitvating
*Harper's Bazaar*
Adiga’s barbed prose deftly skewers India’s tangled religious and
class dynamics, and its literary stereotypes. One character notes,
“What we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in
English, is not literature at all, but flattery.” To his credit,
Adiga offers none.
*New Yorker*
Sparkling . . . Compulsively readable
*Tatler*
Engrossing
*The Cricketer*
A work . . . of almost palpable freshness
*Scotland on Sunday*
Best novel [of 2016] was Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day . . .
Wonderful
*Irish Times*
A gripping tale of ambition, exploration, sexuality and hatred... A
delightful read.
*Indian Express*
[An] ambitious and disquieting novel . . . Adiga’s touch never
falters . . . Adiga’s characters are . . . one of the triumphs of
the book
*Hindustan Times*
Charged with feverish energy, imbued with vivid colour . . .
Another great delivery
*The National*
Adiga seems boundlessly gifted . . . he has produced a nearly
flawless novel, and further proof that he is among our finest
contemporary novelists.
*San Francisco Chronicle*
This is a novel with broad sweep, accomplished with commendable
economy and humor, in a sinewy, compact prose that has the grace
and power of a gifted athlete.
*New York Times Book Review*
Couldn't be more vivid . . . comical and searing . . . Brings a
family, a city and an entire country to scabrous and antic
life.
*Chicago Tribune*
[A] ferociously brilliant novel
*Slate*
Scathingly satirical . . . Bitterly trenchant . . . filled with
smart, spot-on observations
*Newsday*
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