2008 Booker Prize Winner - The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

After my ill-fated effort to anticipate the judges by reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, only to see it fail to make the shortlist, it was a pleasant surprise to find that the same day I finished reading it, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger has won the 2008 Booker Prize:

Mr. Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India and brought up partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. He is the second youngest writer to win the award; Ben Okri was 32 when he won for "The Famished Road" in 1991.

Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year's panel of judges, praised Mr. Adiga's novel, saying that the short list had contained a series of "extraordinarily readable page-turners." However, Mr. Adiga's book had prevailed, he said, "because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure."

I thought it was an unusually promising debut, but it fell short of greatness. I'll have a review up soon detailing why, though I have a bit of a backlog to get through. I'm just too obsessed with the election to sit still for ten minutes and write.