Aravind Adiga Books in Order

For a sharp, darkly comic start: The White Tiger.
For a tense moral dilemma: Amnesty.
For a Mumbai family story: Selection Day → Last Man in Tower.
For linked short fiction: Between the Assassinations.

Aravind Adiga was born on 23 October 1974 in Madras, now Chennai, India, and grew up in Mangalore on the country's southwest coast. His parents' roots were in Mangalore, and he attended school there before his family later moved to Sydney. That early movement between Indian and Australian life gave him more than one vantage point on home, class and belonging.

He studied in India and Australia, then went to Columbia University in New York to study English literature. At Magdalen College, Oxford, he completed an MPhil. Adiga has said he once expected to become an academic, even going on to Princeton after Oxford, but pulled away from the prospect of several more years of study. He needed another route.

Journalism became that route. He began as a financial journalist, including work at the Financial Times, and later returned to India as Time magazine's South Asia correspondent. Reporting made him look closely at money, work, aspiration and the uneven effects of economic change. It also put him in contact with people he might not have encountered otherwise, from business figures to people navigating much tighter margins.

After leaving staff journalism, he wrote The White Tiger, his first novel, published in 2008. Its narrator, Balram Halwai, begins in a poor village and becomes a driver for a wealthy Delhi family, then decides he will not remain in the role assigned to him. The novel won the Booker Prize that year and later became a film. Its blunt, darkly funny account of caste, service, corruption and ambition set the terms readers often associate with Adiga.

It made Adiga widely known almost overnight.

Adiga did not turn that success into a formula. Between the Assassinations is a linked story collection set in the invented coastal town of Kittur, and its many residents reveal different pressures around caste, religion and money. In Last Man in Tower, a Mumbai developer offers life-changing buyouts to the tenants of a worn apartment building. One retired teacher holds out, and the neighbors' hopes begin to pit them against one another.

Selection Day goes back to Mumbai through cricket. It follows brothers Manju and Radha Kumar, whose father has trained them for a future in the sport, while Manju starts to question what he wants for himself. With Amnesty, Adiga shifts the setting to Sydney and follows Danny, a Sri Lankan Tamil cleaner without legal status. Danny has information about a murder, but reporting it could expose him to deportation.

That tension is central to his work.

Across these books, Adiga returns to people whose choices are narrowed by the world around them. He writes about class, migration, family duty, work, masculinity and the desire to remake yourself, but he keeps the stakes personal: a job, a home, a sibling, a secret, a chance to stay. The cities matter too. His characters can be funny, defensive, hopeful or calculating, sometimes within the same conversation. He has continued to write journalism alongside fiction and lives in Mumbai, India.