Book Review: Amnesty by Arvind Adiga

Arvind Adiga is one of my favorite current authors and I am pleased to report that his latest novel, Amnesty, is another excellent addition to his bibliography. The book centers around Dhananjaya, an illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka attempting to fit in and lay low in Sydney, Australia. Arriving in the country on a student visa, he decides to start working at a grocery store and as a cleaner while sequestering himself in a storeroom above his grocery store. Danny stays past the expiration of his student visa and tries his best to fly under the radar, but getting blond highlights and going by “Danny” can only go so far when you are brown-skinned and lugging around a massive vacuum cleaner on your back most of the time. Still, the novel opens with Danny having worked himself into a standard yet unfulfilling and financially unsustainable routine in Sydney. 

Amnesty’s plot concerns Danny getting involved with a murder that he is convinced was committed by one of his cleaning clients. Taking place over the course of a day, the novel features elements of a thriller but it is a slow-burn and much of the “action” takes place through phone calls and Danny’s own internal dialogues of how to proceed. Although it certainly borrows more from genre fiction than Adiga’s other novels, it contains the same sociopolitical punch that fans of White Tiger and Last Man in Tower would appreciate. There is an underlying sense of mistrust between the many immigrants populating the novel and Danny feels utterly lost at sea and unmoored from any help. I found Amnesty to be a gripping read and Adiga did a good job drip-feeding readers Danny’s past and how he got into his current predicament as well as develop the novel’s central plot. In addition to being an entertaining read, Amnesty offers a striking commentary on the immigrant experience in modern society and probably ranks behind only White Tiger when it comes to my favorite Adiga books.