Grim reality of India’s monstrous class divide

Between the Assassinations, By Aravind Adiga, Atlantic Books, €12

Aravind Adiga’s India is a divided country, a place in which the majority of people live short, brutish lives harried by the unbending stratifications of a 5,000year-old caste system, a place in which government corruption is so widely accepted that even to point it out is to find oneself branded a criminal or a lunatic.

Balram Halwai, the narrator of Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning ...