Recommendations
Books Like The White Tiger
Best books to read after The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger puts the logic of the Indian class system in the mouth of the man who exploits it to escape — and then exploit others from below. These 8 books share its satirical intelligence about poverty, ambition, and the violence of economic development.
- 1Buy
Maximum City
by Suketu Mehta
Mehta's 2004 National Book Award-finalist portrait of Mumbai — its underworld, its Bollywood, its bar dancers, its riots — provides the nonfiction companion to The White Tiger's fictional portrait of India's economic transformation: the same social forces, the same class dynamics, the same corruption, seen from the outside by a returned native rather than from the inside by a murderous narrator.
- 2Buy
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo
Boo's 2012 portrait of life in a Mumbai slum — adjacent to luxury hotels next to the international airport — is the most important nonfiction companion to The White Tiger in the literature of Indian poverty: both books insist that the residents of India's informal economy are rational actors making decisions in a system designed to exclude them.
- 3Buy
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Mistry's 1995 novel about four characters brought together in a Bombay apartment during the Emergency is one of the great novels about Indian poverty and its relationship to politics, and the most important fictional predecessor to The White Tiger in the tradition of Indian social realism — though Mistry's sensibility is compassionate and elegiac where Adiga's is satirical and angry.
- 4Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini's 2003 debut about Afghanistan before and after the Soviet invasion shares The White Tiger's quality of making a complex social reality — its class hierarchy, its violence, its specific forms of loyalty and betrayal — legible to a Western audience through a gripping personal narrative, though Hosseini's register is tragic rather than satirical.
- 5Buy
Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts
Roberts's 2003 novel — based on his experience in Mumbai's slums after escaping from an Australian prison — shares The White Tiger's immersion in the criminal underworld of contemporary India and its portrait of the survival strategies available to people the economic system has left behind, though from the perspective of a Western outsider rather than an indigenous escapee.
- 6Buy
Q&A
by Vikas Swarup
Swarup's 2005 novel — on which the film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is based, following a Mumbai slum kid who wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire — is the closest popular companion to The White Tiger in the tradition of Indian rags-to-riches satire: the same improbable escape from poverty, the same indictment of the system, the same dark comedy about what it takes to get out.
- 7Buy
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Roy's 1997 Booker Prize-winning debut about a Kerala family whose tragedy is shaped by the caste system and the Communist politics of the 1960s is the most important Indian novel of the generation before The White Tiger and the foundational text of contemporary Indian literary fiction in English — the tradition that Adiga is both working within and satirizing.
- 8Buy
Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel — about Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of Indian independence, whose life becomes entangled with the history of the nation — is the foundational text of postcolonial Indian fiction in English, the narrative of the nation that The White Tiger implicitly argues against: where Rushdie's novel is about the possibilities of independence, Adiga's is about the betrayal of those possibilities.
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