Amnesty (Hardback)
  • Amnesty (Hardback)
zoom

Amnesty (Hardback)

(author)
2 Reviews Sign in to write a review
£16.99
Hardback 352 Pages
Published: 20/02/2020
  • We can order this from the publisher

Usually dispatched within 2 weeks

  • This item has been added to your basket
Waterstones Says

Set over the course of a single day, the former Booker Prize-winner’s compelling novel poses complex moral questions about rights, responsibilities and the heartbreaking difficulty of doing the right thing. Relayed with Adiga’s customary piercing intelligence and ethical enquiry, Amnesty is very much a novel for our times.

Danny - Dhananjaya Rajaratnam - is an undocumented immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he's been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal Australian life.

But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognizes a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients - a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.

Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga's signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781509879038
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 376 g
Dimensions: 226 x 143 x 32 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

The kind of sharp social anthropology at which Adiga excels . . . Brimming with empathy as well as indignation, this novel . . . extends Adiga’s fictional concern with deprivation and injustice. - Sunday Times

What makes Amnesty an urgent and significant book is the generosity and the humanity of its vision. The abstract issue of immigration, fodder for cheap politics, comes starkly alive in the story of this one man, his past troubles and his present conflict. Amnesty is an ample book, pertinent and necessary. It speaks to our times. - Juan Gabriel Vásquez, New York Times

A mesmerising, breakneck quest of a novel; a search for the true sense of self, for the answer to a moral dilemma which damns either way. The scope and profundity of Victor Hugo, the humour and wit we’ve come to expect from Adiga, and a novel which suggests the impossibility of keeping a sense of the self in a globalised world which either forces assimilation or exile. - Andrew McMillan

[Adiga] has more to say than most novelists, and about 50 more ways to say it . . . Adiga is a startlingly fine observer, and a complicator, in the manner of V.S. Naipaul . . . This novel has a simmering plot . . . You come to this novel for . . . its author’s authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants’ lives. - Dwight Garner, New York Times

Adiga is one of the great observers of power and its deformities, showing in novels like his Booker Prize winning White Tiger and Last Man in Tower how within societies, the powerful lean on the less powerful, and the weak exploit the weaker all the way down. Telling the tale of Danny’s immigration along the story of one tense day, he has built a forceful, urgent thriller for our times. - John Freeman, Lit Hub

A forceful, urgent thriller for our times - Lit Hub

Danny's voice, in its sheer everyday ordinariness, will stay with you a long time. - Daily Mail

Scrutinizes the human condition through a haves-vs.-have-not filter with sly wit and narrative ingenuity . . . Adiga's smart, funny, and timely tale with a crime spin of an undocumented immigrant will catalyze readers. - Booklist

Engrossing . . . vivid . . . Adiga’s enthralling depiction of one immigrant’s tough situation humanizes a complex and controversial global dilemma. - Publishers Weekly

A taut, thrillerlike novel . . . A well-crafted tale of entrapment, alert to the risk of exploitation that follows immigrants in a new country. - Kirkus, starred review

You may also be interested in...

The Hotel Avocado
Added to basket
£22.00
Hardback
Precipice
Added to basket
£22.00   £11.00
Hardback
Death at the Sign of the Rook
Added to basket
£22.00   £16.99
Hardback
Lady Macbeth
Added to basket
£16.99
Hardback
The Life Impossible
Added to basket
£20.00   £14.99
Hardback
Think Again
Added to basket
£22.00
Hardback
There Are Rivers in the Sky
Added to basket
£18.99   £15.99
Hardback
Shy Creatures
Added to basket
£20.00   £16.99
Hardback
Gabriel's Moon
Added to basket
£20.00
Hardback
Safe Enough
Added to basket
£22.00   £18.99
Hardback
The Examiner
Added to basket
£18.99
Hardback
The Voyage Home
Added to basket
£20.00
Hardback
We'll Prescribe You a Cat
Added to basket
The Full Moon Coffee Shop
Added to basket
£16.99   £14.99
Hardback
Munichs
Added to basket
£20.00   £16.99
Hardback
The Lantern of Lost Memories
Added to basket
£14.99   £12.99
Hardback
The Instrumentalist
Added to basket
£16.99   £14.99
Hardback
The Blanket Cats
Added to basket

“A gripping and ambitious literary thriller”

Adiga’s new book is an exciting and original blend of crime thriller and psychological meditation bound up in a narrative with an important political edge.

The premise surrounding a day-in-the-life account of... More

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 43

“Good Read”

Thank you to the publishers for this review copy, having loved The White Tiger way back in 2009 I was very pleased to receive this.
So whilst still in lockdown it reached the top of my to be read pile and I completely... More

Hardback edition
1 similar book recommended
Helpful? Upvote 27

Please sign in to write a review

Your review has been submitted successfully.

env: aptum
branch: