Industry Reviews
"Selection Day is, by any judgment, top-rate fiction from a young master... Adiga's plot is gripping." -- "The Times (UK)"
"Selection Day, Mr. Adiga's third novel, supplies further proof that his Booker Prize, won for The White Tiger in 2008, was no fluke. He is not merely a confident storyteller but also a thinker, a skeptic, a wily entertainer, a thorn in the side of orthodoxy and cant... Powerful... Soulful... What this novel offers is the sound of a serious and nervy writer working at near the top of his form. Like a star cricket batter, Mr. Adiga stands and delivers, as if for days."-- "Dwight Garner, New York Times"
"A compelling tale of cricket and corruption... A finely told, often moving, and intelligent novel... Adiga has grown in his art since his Booker prizewinning debut, The White Tiger." -- "The Guardian"
"Adiga writes a prose of crazed energy, bright color and acrobatic logic... comical and searing... Selection Day brings a family, a city and an entire country to scabrous and antic life."-- "Michael Upchurch, The Chicago Tribune"
"Adiga's wit and raw sympathy will carry uninitiated readers beyond their ignorance of cricket...Adiga's paragraphs bounce along like a ball hit hard down a dirt street. One gets the general direction, but the vectors of his story can change at any moment as we chase after these characters...Selection Day evolves into a bittersweet reflection on the limits of what we can select. Choice -- that most enticing Western ideal -- does not thrive everywhere equally...Adiga's voice is so exuberant, his plotting so jaunty, that the sadness of this story feels as though it is accumulating just outside our peripheral vision."-- "Ron Charles, The Washington Post"
"Exuberant and incisive...Each sentence flickers like a match with life. Adiga swoops in and out of his characters' inner voices with frightening precision and speed, laying out the paranoia, obsessions, tokens, idols, and self-made prisons of each man in a few bright, laserlike sentences...Richness and rot, decadence and decay, cricket and corruption: These make up Adiga's Mumbai. Selection Day asks: Amidst all this, is there any such thing as freedom?"-- "Annalisa Quinn, NPR"
"Many novelists are called Dickensian, but Adiga comes closer than most, albeit with every last speck of Victorian sentimentality suctioned out. His characters are brightly and sharply drawn and animated with great energy; reading about his Mumbai is like taking a double shot of espresso...You need not know anything about cricket in any of its variations to savor Selection Day. In fact, you don't need to have any interest in sports at all. Cricket serves Adiga as a marvelously flexible metaphor: for the (lost) dream of civic integrity, for tradition and authority, for the contest that is life in a rapidly evolving economy...Class is Adiga's great theme, and his depiction of its workings in India ranges from the fondly comical to the savage...[a] ferociously brilliant novel."-- "Laura Miller, Slate"
"Mr. Adiga writes with customary acerbity and astuteness. Class resentment is the gasoline that fuels the brothers' ambitions and gives this novel its noisy volatility. The gritty urban realism that animated The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower is again on display...Selection Day churns with the same propulsive energy."-- "Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal"
"Spirited...the elements of Selection Day are strong throughout: a dramatic, readable arc; satire glinting with hints of tragedy; a witty, vibrant voice."-- "Hamilton Cain, The Minneapolis Star Tribune"
"The best novel I read this year... In its primal triangle of rival brothers and a maniacal father, hell-bent on success in cricket in India, Adiga grips the passions while painting an extraordinary panorama of contemporary sports, greed, celebrity, and mundanity. As a literary master, Adiga has only advanced in his art since his Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger." -- "Mark Greif, The Atlantic"
"This is a novel with a broad sweep, accomplished with commendable economy and humor, in a sinewy, compact prose that has the grace and power of a gifted athlete. And it pulses with affection for Mumbai itself; the effortless sociological dissection recalls Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers... Selection Day transcends sport. This is a book about choice and destiny, smothering family ambition and the pull of a young person's nascent identity. You're just going to have to trust me that the cricket is worth it."-- "Marcel Theroux, The New York Times Book Review"
