Selection Day

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 Aravind Adiga's enthralling Selection Day studies, with universalizing insight, two brothers from Mumbai consecrated to cricket at psychic cost -- Paul Binding, 'Book of the Year' 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. -- Hirsh Sawhney 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 -- Peter Parker 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...