A critic who has read the manuscript of ...Assassinations feels it is 'more raw, less self-conscious and perhaps more nuanced than The White Tiger'. Come November, when the book will be published in India, and we'll know if Adiga's actual first novel, rather than his first-published one, would have been a more worthy contender for the Booker.

Between the Assassinations is a collection of short stories and is being published by Picador in India. It will hit stores in India on the first of November. Between the Assassinations is redolent. It glistens with the beauty of the rural, coastal south where it is set. Its subject is the pathos, injustices and ironies of Indian life. The book will have a print run of 16,000 copies, which is on the higher side for fiction in India.

Set in the small Karnataka town of Kittur, ...Assassinations attempts a portrait of the town and its inhabitants, across class, caste, religion and occupation. Among them are an illiterate Muslim boy who is dazzled by a handsome Islamic terrorist a Dalit bookseller arrested for selling a pirated copy of The Satanic Verses a journalist confronting the yawning gap between what happened during a communal riot and what his newspaper is willing to print and the widow of a farmer who turns in vain to the local Communist leader for help. 'What emerges,' according to the blurb, 'is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi-a time of great transformations.'

ARAVIND ADIGA was born in Madras, India, in 1974.

• He completed his schooling in India and Australia.

• He graduated from Columbia University in New York with a B.A. in English literature.

• After his B.A., he went on a scholarship from Columbia to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received his M.Phil. in English literature.
• He went into journalism in 2000 through an internship at the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Financial Times.

• His review of previous Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's book, Oscar and Lucinda, appeared in The Second Circle, an online literary review.

• In 2003, he returned to India as a correspondent for Time magazine ,where he remained a South Asia correspondent for three years before going freelance.
• During his freelance period, he wrote The White Tiger.

• He currently lives in Mumbai, India

He is the fourth Indian-born author to win the Booker Prize since it was launched in 1969, joining Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie. He is also the second youngest winner in the prize’s 40-year history

The White Tiger is a compelling first novel about the new India that is growing roots all around us,The White Tiger is an unexpected journey into a new India. Aravind Adiga is a talent to watch.' Mohsin Hamid, Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist 'In the grand illusions of a and risingand India, Aravind Adiga has found a subject Gogol might have envied. With remorselessly and delightfully mordant wit The White Tiger anatomises the fantastic cravings of the rich; it evokes, too, with startling accuracy and tenderness, the no less desperate struggles of the deprived.' Pankaj Mishra 'Unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read in recent years, this page-turner offers a completely bald, angry, unadorned portrait of the country as seen from the bottom of the heap; there's not a sniff of saffron or a swirl of sari anywhere. Narrated by Balram, a self-styled andquot;entrepreneurandquot; who has murdered his employer, the book follows his progress from child labourer, via humiliation as a servant and driver, to a mysterious new life in Bangalore. Balram himself is an enticing figure, whose reasons for murder become completely understandable by the end, but even more impressive is the nitty-gritty of Indian life that Adiga unearths: the corruption, the class system, the sheer petty viciousness. The Indian tourist board won't be pleased, but you'll read it in a trice and find yourself gripped.