Description
‘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 AwardFrom the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of the Oscar-nominated film 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. 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
