Amnesty

Starred review from December 1, 2019
An undocumented immigrant from Sri Lanka tries to elude the forces, legal and otherwise, working to push him out of Australia. Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, the hero of this taut, thrillerlike novel by the Booker Prize-winning Adiga (Selection Day, 2017, etc.), has done everything he can to pass through Sydney unnoticed after his student visa expires. He goes by Danny, the better to assimilate, and works as a housecleaner so fastidious and efficient he's nicknamed Legendary Cleaner. He lives cheaply and unobtrusively in a storeroom above a grocery store and buys expensive hair highlights to blend into an increasingly expensive city. But during the course of the day the novel covers, his unstable perch is getting wobblier. His phone is obsolete and he can't afford to replace it, cutting off his lifeline, and he witnesses the aftermath of what he's sure is a murder committed by Dr. Prakash, one of his clients. The plot of the novel mainly turns on Prakash's attempts to bully Danny into silence, lest he be reported to Australian immigration authorities. ("Easiest thing in the world, becoming invisible to white people, who don't see you anyway; but the hardest thing is becoming invisible to brown people, who will see you no matter what.") But Adiga cannily balances his assured plotting with a style that evokes Danny's justified paranoia. Amid the tick-tock of Danny's reckoning with Prakash, Adiga chronicles his hero's history as a migrant, which involves a demoralizing stint in a scammy university and an increasing realization that getting along means disclosing information others can use. "Each time a door opened or slammed...Danny's heart contracted," Adiga writes, and he expertly translates that anxiety to the reader. A well-crafted tale of entrapment, alert to the risk of exploitation that follows immigrants in a new country.

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December 9, 2019
Adiga (The White Tiger) briskly captures an undocumented immigrant’s moral dilemma over whether to help the police solve a murder or remain under the radar in this engrossing tale. After leaving Sri Lanka to attend college in Sydney, Dhananjaya “Danny” Rajaratnam quits school, loses his student visa, and fails to gain refugee status, but he stays in Australia out of fear for his safety back home, where he was misidentified as a Tamil terrorist. He sleeps in a grocery storeroom and earns cash cleaning homes and doing odd jobs. For four years he escapes notice by authorities; even his leftist Vietnamese girlfriend, Sonja, doesn’t know he’s in the country illegally. After one of his clients—Indian-born Radha Thomas—is murdered, Danny deduces that her murderer is her lover, a violent man nicknamed the Doctor. Danny knows Radha and the Doctor frequented the creek where Radha’s body was discovered, and that the Doctor owned a jacket resembling the one wrapped around the body. Adiga recounts Danny’s thoughts, memories, doubts, and hesitation as well as his aborted phone calls with police and ominous contacts with the Doctor, all within a single day. With nuance and vivid faced by a range of Asian Australians while highlighting the dangers faced by the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Adiga’s enthralling depiction of one immigrant’s tough situation humanizes a complex and controversial global dilemma. (Feb.)
This review has been updated.

December 1, 2019
In his latest novel, following Selection Day (2017), Booker Prize-winner Adiga confronts a universal conundrum: at what price are we willing to do the right thing? Over not quite 11 working hours, Dhananjaya Rajaratnam?who's been living in Sydney for the past four years as Danny, a diligent housecleaner whose backpack vacuum cleaner makes him look more like an astronaut?has to decide if he's going to help solve a murder. The probable cost is freedom: being an invisible Australian means he's free forever in Sydney, even as he's trapped forever in Sydney. Returning to his native Sri Lanka is not an option. Just as he's finishing a morning job, Danny learns that H5?the owner of House Number Five, according to his truncated client nomenclature?is dead and quickly deduces that H6 is involved. As the hours pass, Danny just wants to deliver a cactus to his Vietnamese girlfriend (with a dose of truth), all the while avoiding the police, deportation, and a tenacious murderer. Adiga, who's become a part-time Australian, again scrutinizes the human condition through a haves-vs.-have-not filter with sly wit and narrative ingenuity.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Adiga's smart, funny, and timely tale with a crime spin of an undocumented immigrant will catalyze readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 1, 2020

The Booker Prize-winning Adiga (The White Tiger) explores a profound moral dilemma with the story of Danny, an undocumented Tamil from Sri Lanka who works as a house cleaner in Sydney, Australia. By learning to speak with an Australian accent, dyeing his hair blond to look cool, dating a Vietnamese nurse, and working very hard at his job, Danny does everything he can to fit in and escape detection. All goes well until a female client is murdered. Unfortunately, he knows who murdered her, and the novel proceeds to follow two major themes: Danny's struggling with whether to contact authorities, tell all he knows, and thus risk deportation; and what life is like for those who live illegally in Australia. With documentary precision, Adiga portrays the exploitation, risks, danger, paranoia, dreadful living conditions, and psychological stress faced by undocumented refugees. VERDICT Like Valeria Luiselli in Lost Children Archive, Adiga bears witness to the disruption, pain, and hardship inherent in needing to leave one's country and find refuge elsewhere. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]--Jacqueline Snider, Toronto

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2019

Having been denied refugee status after fleeing Sri Lanka, Dhananjaya Rajaratnam (now called Danny) lives illegally in Australia, where he works as a cleaner and feels that he's maybe achieved a pretty normal life. Then a client is murdered, and he suspects that a jacket found at the crime scene belongs to another client--a doctor with whom she had been having an affair. Does he risk all by coming forward or let an injustice stand? As always, the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger and Selection Day, now a Netflix series, asks tough questions.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.