Description

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, comes the story of an undocumented immigrant who becomes the only witness to a crime and must face an impossible moral dilemma.

‘Alive with empathy, indignation and the sharp satiric reportage at which Aravind Adiga excels, this novel grippingly extends his concern for deprivation and injustice.’ – Sunday Times ‘Books of the Year’

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award

Danny – formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam – is an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Denied refugee status, working as a cleaner and living out of a grocery storeroom in Sydney, for four years he has been trying to create a new identity for himself, finally coming as close as he ever has to living a normal life.

One morning, Danny learns that his client Radha Thomas has been murdered. A jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another client, a doctor with whom Radha was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward as a witness and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single ordinary, yet extraordinary day, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights nevertheless has responsibilities . . .

Suspenseful, propulsive, 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.

‘[Adiga] is a startlingly fine observer . . . You come to this novel for its author’s authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants’ lives.’ – New York Times

Publisher Review

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 * Engrossing . . . vivid . . . Adiga's enthralling depiction of one immigrant's tough situation humanizes a complex and controversial global dilemma. * Publishers Weekly * 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 * Danny's voice, in its sheer everyday ordinariness, will stay with you a long time. * Daily Mail * A forceful, urgent thriller for our times * Lit Hub * 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 * [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 * 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. -- Andrew McMillan What makes Amnesty an urgent and significant book is the generosity and the humanity of its vision . . . Amnesty is an ample book, pertinent and necessary. It speaks to our times. -- Juan Gabriel Vasquez * New York Times * 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 *