Amnesty
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, comes the story of an undocumented immigrant who becomes the only witness to a crime and must face an impossible moral dilemma.
'Alive with empathy, indignation and the sharp satiric reportage at which Aravind Adiga excels, this novel grippingly extends his concern for deprivation and injustice.' - Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'
Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award
Danny – formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam – is an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Denied refugee status, working as a cleaner and living out of a grocery storeroom in Sydney, for four years he has been trying to create a new identity for himself, finally coming as close as he ever has to living a normal life.
One morning, Danny learns that his client Radha Thomas has been murdered. A jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another client, a doctor with whom Radha was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward as a witness and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single ordinary, yet extraordinary day, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights nevertheless has responsibilities . . .
Suspenseful, propulsive, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.
'[Adiga] is a startlingly fine observer . . . You come to this novel for its author's authority, wit and feeling on the subject of immigrants' lives.' - New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Adiga (The White Tiger) briskly captures an undocumented immigrant's moral dilemma over whether to help the police solve a murder or remain under the radar in this engrossing tale. After leaving Sri Lanka to attend college in Sydney, Dhananjaya "Danny" Rajaratnam quits school, loses his student visa, and fails to gain refugee status, but he stays in Australia out of fear for his safety back home, where he was misidentified as a Tamil terrorist. He sleeps in a grocery storeroom and earns cash cleaning homes and doing odd jobs. For four years he escapes notice by authorities; even his leftist Vietnamese girlfriend, Sonja, doesn't know he's in the country illegally. After one of his clients Indian-born Radha Thomas is murdered, Danny deduces that her murderer is her lover, a violent man nicknamed the Doctor. Danny knows Radha and the Doctor frequented the creek where Radha's body was discovered, and that the Doctor owned a jacket resembling the one wrapped around the body. Adiga recounts Danny's thoughts, memories, doubts, and hesitation as well as his aborted phone calls with police and ominous contacts with the Doctor, all within a single day. With nuance and vivid faced by a range of Asian Australians while highlighting the dangers faced by the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Adiga's enthralling depiction of one immigrant's tough situation humanizes a complex and controversial global dilemma. This review has been updated.
