There were a lot of things that didn’t work for me in this novel. Right out of the gate, I didn’t like that there were no chapters - just one long text. The structure of the book and the main character just ended up grating on me. I’ve always wanted to read “White Tiger” but I’m definitely second guessing that now. I just don’t think this writer is for me.

Amnesty takes a very original take on the life of an "illegal". The narrative follows Danny, a young Sri Lankan who deliberately overstayed his visa and now resides in Sydney as invisibly as he can. He works as a cash in hand cleaner. One of his clients is murdered and he thinks he knows who is the murderer. His quandary is whether to talk to the police, a big no no for a non-person, or to live with his conscious.

His portrayal of life as an illegal is empathetic and believable. The book is full of witty observations, pointed barbs and sad truths.

Writing is excellent. Story is okay.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC and all the best to the author.

If you’re in the mood for an uplifting story, keep looking. Well written novel that details the struggles of an “illegal alien.”

Thank you Scribner for a complimentary copy. I voluntarily reviewed this book. All opinions expressed are my own.

Amnesty
By: Aravind Adiga

REVIEW ☆☆☆

I had high hopes for Amnesty, but it fell short of my expectations. I was initially interested in the story, but I didn't get very far before I just lost interest. Try as I might, I was not intrigued by the story. This one was a no for me.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

With very mixed reviews and a slow start, I decided not to finish this one now. I'm not the right reader for it at the moment. I plan to start by reading his novel with more acclaim, The White Tiger.

As close of a return to The White Tiger as one can get as regards the complexity of the narrative, the underlying social message, and entertainment value. With this most recent novel it looks as if Adiga has returned to his Booker-worthy form.

Couldn’t get into this and couldn’t finish so I won’t be leaving a review on good reads or instagram. Could be a timing issue! If I try again and enjoy I will put on my Instagram!

I found this a really interesting read about what it’s like to be an undocumented immigrant in Australia. Adiga tells the story through the eyes of Danny, who has fled his native Sri Lanka after torture. He comes to Australia through a school program, applies for refugee status but is denied, and then stays on past his visa.

Danny is a housecleaner who finds out one day that one of his clients has been murdered.  Danny knows she was having an affair and it’s likely this affair has something to do with her death.  He's also pretty sure if he goes to the police, he’ll be deported.

Most of the book takes place during a single day, but in that day you get a pretty good idea of what Danny’s life is like -- the constant fear he lives with and the vulnerability of living as someone who is undocumented.  For example, he has no access to health care, no protection from authorities, and as a laborer he can easily be taken advantage of.  Survival means staying invisible and blending in.

He's a sympathetic character, though not a saint either. His relationship with this client is pretty sketchy and he seems to go along with things he shouldn’t. He has a girlfriend he thinks about a lot, but she doesn’t know anything about his life, and this relationship never seemed real to me.  

While the story is uneven at times, I liked the way this book challenged my beliefs.  Going to the police when you know something about a crime seems like the obvious and right thing to do, so I found myself rooting for Danny to do the right thing. But what’s right when you know that doing it means being sent back to a country that will torture you, or worse?  Also, Danny’s relationship with his client, and her lover, is complicated.  Why should he sacrifice himself for someone who is (1) already dead and (2) wasn’t terribly nice or honest?

Seen through Danny’s eyes, there’s a panicky, almost feverish quality to the writing and we aren’t always sure we know what’s happening.  For me, that sense of panic added to the story, although it was also difficult to follow at times, and repetitive.  Readers looking for a typical mystery-thriller will be disappointed.  This is a book about a murder but that’s really not what this story is about.

There were times I wanted to like Danny more than I did, but I always felt sympathetic to his plight, and I felt Adiga gave us a thoughtful, layered look at race and immigration issues.

For readers who found this book interesting, I highly recommend these books about the U.S. immigration system, especially Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas.

Note: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and publisher Scribner.  This book was published on February 18, 2020.

Amnesty explores the angst of an undocumented immigrant from Sri Lanka in an Australia hostile to the undocumented. He is torn between a self-protective instinct to remain hidden and a moral obligation to report a murderer when doing so might lead to his deportation. The book is well written and does a terrific job of describing the lead character's conflicting emotions. I recommend the book as both entertaining and as a window into the same type of immigration issues that make the headlines here.

Danny is an undocumented immigrant from Sri Lanka living in Australia. As he's undocumented, he works as a cleaner and gets paid under the table. One day, he is contacted by the police as one of his clients had been murdered. Danny realizes that he likely knows who the murderer is, but has to decide whether or not to share that information with the police. If he does talk to the police, his undocumented status will likely be discovered and he would likely be deported.

This book spans one day in Danny's life, but flashes back to show you how and why he ended up as an undocumented person in Australia. And wow, that's a hard, scary life. The book both calls attention to the unfair, and frankly quite Draconian, immigration policies of Australia and presents a really interesting ethical dilemma. The central question of the book is kind of "what do we owe to each other"? Does Danny have a responsibility to turn in the murderer, even if it means his own life will be irreparably changed for the worse? Danny grapples with this question for much of the book, and it's a really interesting thought experiment. Really, my only complaint is that the last third or so of the book is really repetitive, I found the first two thirds to be fairly riveting.

Folks who are interested in ethics or who are interested in the hardships of the immigrant experience should definitely pick this book up. 3.5 stars. I really liked the first 2/3.

Thanks to Scribner and Netgalley for the eARC which I received in exchance for an unbiased review. Amnesty is available now.

In thinking about this book after reading it, I begin to appreciate the disjointedness of the story. Danny, an illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka, has been in Australia for four years. His life was disjointed as he was continually fearful of being deported. He’s a house cleaner and his life is further complicated by his belief he knows who killed one of his clients. He’s an honest person and knows he must report his information to the police. In doing so he stands a chance of being deported. At times, the disjointedness was confusing and even with the story clearly labeled with the time of day things were happening, it still felt longer than 12 hours. What is most clear from reading this book is that illegal immigrants contribute to the economy of the country, but their illegal status makes them prey for being cheated out of what they have earned.

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.

Published by Scribner on February 18, 2020

Dhananjaya Rajaratnam has reinvented himself as Danny, a self-employed house cleaner in Sydney. For four years, he has been “a brown man in a white man’s city.” Danny is Tamil but he has added golden highlights to his hair. The weirdness of his appearance appeals to Australians, or so he believes. Danny was a minority in Sri Lanka but he prefers Australia, where being “not like everyone else” earns respect.

Danny came to Sydney on a student visa, dropped out, and stayed in the country illegally. He finds it easy to become “invisible to white people, who don’t see you anyway.” Danny works as a shelf stocker for an angry Greek shopkeeper. In exchange, he sleeps in a storeroom and gives the Greek half his earnings from cleaning jobs. Danny faces competition from Chinese and Nepali cleaners who offer more people on a team for the same hourly rate, but he scores clients by furnishing his own equipment; “a cleaner impresses with his autonomy.”

Danny is dating Sonja, an Asian whose accepting liberalism makes him comfortable. He has not told Sonja the real reason he can’t return to school or get a driver’s license. Nor does she know that he can’t get healthcare.

Those problems are common to undocumented migrants across the world, but Amnesty highlights a particular problem that has an impact not just on migrants, but on the societies in which they live. Many of the apartments Danny cleans are in the same vicinity. While cleaning one of them, he becomes aware that a crime was committed in another. A former cleaning client named Radha Thomas was murdered. He happens to know (and might be the only person who knows) that another client, a man named Prakash Wadhwa, was having an affair with Radha and had behaved violently toward her. Should he tell the police and risk deportation, or should he protect his own interest by allowing a possible killer to escape justice?

A just society, or even a society motivated by self-interest rather than prejudice, would reward a migrant who reports a crime by granting some form of amnesty. Deporting people who act in a country’s interest discourages undocumented migrants from doing the right thing. Even citizens who hate immigrants, citizens who are motivated by self-interest in the perceived struggle of “us” versus “them,” should be able to understand the logic of rewarding migrants who act in society’s interest rather than their own.

While Danny marvels at the justice system in Australia — a system considerably more just than Sri Lanka’s, were Danny was tortured for being Tamil — he knows that he will not be rewarded for contacting the police. He also knows that if he doesn’t, Prakash might flee the country, perhaps after killing Danny if Danny gives him that chance. Whether Danny will do the right thing under difficult circumstances — contact the police and risk deportation, tell the truth to Sonja and risk the end of their relationship — is the moral question that drives the plot.

The plot, however, is simply a vehicle to explore broader issues of social division. Aravind Adiga accomplishes that purpose with an observant view of Australian society. Danny perceives Sydney as divided between the thick bum suburbs, “where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves,” and the thin bum suburbs, “where the fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their own homes.” The thick bums resent immigrants and the thin bums exploit them, exchanging cash for labor without asking questions that might compromise the arrangement.

In Danny’s unflattering opinion, “Australians aren’t particularly bright. They don’t work hard. They drink too much. So you tell me. Why are they so rich?” The answer, of course, is that average Aussies are rich only in comparison to average citizens of less fortunate nations. Wealthy nations prosper, in part, by taking advantage of developing nations. The unequal distribution of wealth and how that bears on the issue of undocumented migration is one of Adiga’s underlying themes.

But even the brown men in the city are divided by status. The “Western Suburbs Indians, smug in their jobs and Toyota Camrys,” the Australian-born children who look at Danny with “I’ve got nothing in common with you, mate glances,” the Malaysian tourists shopping for cholesterol medication. Since they are Danny’s color, they all see him, and they all look down on him. Hence the golden highlights in Danny’s hair, the insolent indifference with which he returns their stares, the futile attempt to make them think his status might be similar to theirs.

Adiga addresses these urgent themes with his usual ability to find humor in serious issues, although his use of humor — including the social division between thick and thin bums — is less overt than in White Tiger and Selection Day. Adiga portrays Danny not as a stereotype or even an archetype of an illegal immigrant, but as a unique individual who, unlike the illegals he knows, does not experience shame as “an atmospheric force, pressing down from the outside,” but as a force that “bubbled up from within.” His shame is connected to his past in Sri Lanka. He would feel it even if Australia made him a citizen. For that reason, Adiga is an uncommonly sympathetic character, one who deals not only with the external pressure of prejudice and the fear of deportation, but internalized anxiety about his self-worth. In the end, Danny must ask himself what kind of person he truly is.

Amnesty is not a thriller, despite some marketing that suggests it can be read as one. The plot is thin by thriller standards, the action is tepid, and the resolution is unsurprising. As a serious exploration of issues confronting immigrants who lose (or never acquire) their legal status, Amnesty delivers provocative questions rather than chase scenes. Both in its dissection of pressing social problems and in its portrayal of a complex protagonist, Amnesty is another compelling work from Aravind Adiga.

RECOMMENDED

What an unexpected page turner. Danny as an "illegal" immigrant in Sydney, Australian. He is a house cleaner that lives out of a grocery storeroom. For years Danny tries to blend in with the locals, he stays hidden in plain sight, by hiding his accent and changes his outer appearance. Well one day Danny learns that one of his clients was murdered and he believes he knows who the killer is. Without spoiling any details Adiga puts on the edge of you seat with this one. I can’t tell you how many times I was yelling at Kindle as Danny takes us through all these twists and turns.

Adiga, did a great job describing the struggle of undocumented immigrates and just so you know that ‘doctor’ was such a creep! Over all this was a fast pace read, I was able to complete this in one sitting.

Thank you, Scribner for the gifted DARC via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

In “Amnesty,” Indian author Aravind Adiga plunges the reader into one tumultuous day in the life of Dhananjaya “Danny” Rajaratnam, an illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka desperately trying to remain invisible in Sydney, Australia. When he discovers that one of his housecleaning clients has been murdered—and realizes that another of his clients is the probable murderer—Danny must decide whether to contact the police and risk any chance of a future in Australia in order to fulfill what he believes to be his civic duty—or to remain silent. I’ve not read any of Aravind Adiga’s previous books, so I can’t say if the frenetic, almost stream-of-consciousness narration is characteristic of his style, but it works really well for this story, building tension and conveying the constant state of alert in which Danny exists. As a running clock ticks off Danny’s life from hour to hour—and sometimes minute to minute or even second to second—a portrait emerges of a well-meaning and honest man who finds himself in circumstances he didn’t plan for or expect. A visceral, timely and compassionate look at what it means to be illegal in today’s world. I will definitely be reading Adiga’s other books.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

I liked this book, although sometimes the pacing felt a little slow. I felt a constant sense of stress when reading Danny’s perspective from beginning to end—the constant weighing, considering, second guessing of being an undocumented immigrant was well described. A timely read.

“A legal is just someone who is unwanted in the same way everyone else is.”

Danny, a young adult in his twenties from Sri Lanka, has been living in Australia illegally for four years as a cleaner. Soon into the novel, one of the residents that he cleaned for is killed. Danny might have an idea of what could have happened, but he internally struggles with the responsibility of this knowledge since the decision to help with the murder case could get him deported. The novel takes place throughout this one day in Danny’s life.

The story pays homage to the thoughts and decisions that immigrants, specifically illegals, make throughout the day. It highlights questions of accountability and examines the echelons of humanity. Danny’s flashbacks and encounters throughout the day also illuminate his own prejudice towards legal immigrants and citizens.

The writing was disjointed and made it hard for me to read. I found myself rereading sentences often to make sure I read them correctly. Sometimes that made it hard to process different things that were occurring, which took away from the enjoyment. It is written in an unusual way and Danny was a peculiar character who had eccentric qualities.

In <i>Amnesty</i>, Aravind Adiga tells the story of Dhananjaya Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil from Batticaloa, the most beautiful and mysterious city on the Sri Lankan coast, famous for its magical lagoon with its singing fish. Danny returns to Batticaloa after working for a year as a motel clerk in Dubai — wearing a suit to work! — and finds himself suspected and tortured by local police for involvement in the Tamil Tigers. Danny hops a flight to Sydney on a student visa, decides that diploma mill for foreigners seeking citizenship is too expensive, and files a futile petition for asylum. Danny chooses life as an illegal immigrant: <i>Asylum</i> follows him through his four years in Australia. This is a classic immigration story, but set in Australia and with an apparently middle class immigrant.

<i>Asylum</i> contains many wonderful touches. Danny pretends to be vegetarian, so that he can find a girlfriend through the online app VeggieDate, but he yearns for mutton, pork, and chicken; he takes two stuffed pandas to bed in his storeroom bedroom above a small grocery store in Glebe; he divides Sydney suburbs into thick bum — working class — and thin bum — Yuppie. He supports himself as a Legendary Cleaner who never wears a face mask to avoid frightening clients. Most of all, Danny strives to look as Australian and as unobtrusive as possible, especially fearing the wealthy and middle class icebox Indians and the Tamils in Australia legally, thinking that they will immediately identify him as illegal.

Adiga interjects many poignant touches into <i>Asylum</i>. Danny ruefully prides himself as honest, reliable, and intelligent. He finds some comfort in downtown Sydney, with its polyglot, multiracial crowds, and panics in Sydney’s white suburbs, where he fears identification as illegal. Danny works hard at assimilating, or at least at what he believes is assimilating: he takes care not to pronounce the “p” in “receipt”, he takes notes on the different types of rugby, he highlights his hair. In the end, Danny must choose between his own uprightness and his life in Australia.

<i>Asylum</i> provides a different perspective on immigration than other excellent recent novels such as Mohsin Hamid's <i>Exit West</i>, Sunjeev Sahota's <i>The Year of the Runaways</i>, Valeria Luiselli's <i>Lost Children Archive</i>, and Yuri Herrera's <i>Signs Proceeding the End of the World</i>. I’ve read four of Aravind Adiga’s five novels, and all feature transparently lucid prose, what feels like effortless writing, and characters and situations that veer between utmost seriousness and cockeyed humor. <i>Asylum</i> ranks with Adiga’s best. 4.5 stars