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Last Man In Tower, By Aravind Adiga

 

Boyd Tonkin Author Biography

Boyd Tonkin

Boyd Tonkin is Literary Editor at The Independent. An award-winning journalist, he was formerly Social Policy Editor of the New Statesman and has broadcast extensively for BBC arts and current affairs programmes. He has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

More articles from this journalist

Friday 09 March 2012

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Like the impromptu cricket shots on crowded Juhu beach, "what is squirming, quicksilver, heterodox thrives" in Mumbai. So how, in this flashy, reckless, go-getting Indian metropolis, can a man like "Masterji" survive?

A retired teacher, widowed, he lives his old-school values as "sovereign of your plot of earth" – or rather, as third-floor denizen of the Vishram Society flats in the airport suburb of Santa Cruz. A property tycoon offers tower-dwellers a fortune to quit; Masterji alone holds out.

From this premise, Adiga builds a funny, tender, satirical and hugely readable panorama of changing lives in one spot that in some ways trumps Lanchester's Capital. Last year's strange Man Booker panel scorned it. For every other reader, an all-round treat awaits.

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