1st Time Novelist wins 2008 Man Booker Prize
Indian writer Aravind Adiga's first novel,
The White Tiger, was announced the winner of the
2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Born in a village in heartland India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape - of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.
The White Tiger is a tale of two Indias. Balram’s journey from darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.
from: Man Booker Prize web site
The White Tiger was one of six shortlisted titles for the prize. Also shortlisted for this year's prize were:
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
