The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, is a savagely funny, deeply angry novel about modern India told as a long late-night letter from a self-made entrepreneur to the visiting Premier of China. Balram Halwai grew up in a village in the so-called Darkness of rural Bihar, in a family poor enough that he was pulled out of school as a child to wash glasses in a tea shop. By the time the novel opens, he is the prosperous owner of a Bangalore taxi service, and what he wants the Premier to understand is exactly how a man like him gets from there to here in the new India. The path runs through service: Balram becomes a chauffeur for the family of a coal-mining baron in Delhi, where he learns the codes by which the wealthy live, the small humiliations by which they keep their drivers in place, and the precise moment at which a servant decides he has had enough. Adiga writes with vicious humor and unflinching clarity about caste, corruption, the fantasy of national progress, and the violence on which a great deal of comfort quietly rests. The White Tiger is short, propulsive, and unforgettable, the sort of novel that people argue about for weeks after finishing.
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Across seven nights in his Bangalore office, self-styled entrepreneur Balram Halwai writes long letters to visiting Chinese premier Wen Jiabao explaining how a tea-shop boy from the village of Laxmangarh became a Bangalore taxi service owner, by way of working as a driver for a wealthy Delhi family.
Yes. The White Tiger won the 2008 Booker Prize. It was Aravind Adiga's debut novel, written when he was 33.
Yes. Netflix released a 2021 film adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani and starring Adarsh Gourav. The film follows the novel's caustic look at Indian class mobility.
The White Tiger was written by Aravind Adiga, published in 2008 by imusti.
The White Tiger is 321 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The White Tiger takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The White Tiger is a standalone novel by Aravind Adiga, not part of a series.
The White Tiger is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
