Amnesty
Author: Aravind Adiga
Publisher: Scribner
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A riveting, suspenseful, and exuberant novel from the bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day about a young illegal immigrant who must decide whether to report crucial information about a murder — and thereby risk deportation.
Danny — formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam — is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life.
But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients — a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.
Propulsive, insightful, 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.
TL;DR Review
Amnesty is an in-depth look at the world from an illegal immigrant’s perspective that leaves a ringing, lasting impression.
For you if: You don’t mind books that ask a little extra from you because they are more literary / cerebral.
Full Review
Nothing is simple for a man like this one. Not even being helpless. Or harmless. Life is a battle, and though unevenly so, everyone is armed.
Amnesty was a really unique book, at least for me, and so it also moved me in a unique way. Told over the course of one single day, it follows an illegal immigrant living in Sydney, Australia, named Danny.
Danny has been in Sydney for four years. He originally traveled there on a student visa and then applied for asylum, but was denied. So he stayed illegally. Now he has a girlfriend he loves and a steady stream of clients whose houses he cleans, so life is pretty good. But then one of them is murdered, and Danny thinks another one of his clients may have killed her. In fact, Danny is probably the only person who knows about the connection between them. But if he tells the police, he’ll be deported. He spends the day agonizing over the decision, which is not helped by the fact that the potential killer keeps calling him and harassing him.
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book told in one day before. At certain times, it made me feel a little impatient for the plot to move along. But at other times, I was hit by the way the author could slow so far down and use an exacting level of detail to leave an impression. And the spiraling nature of Danny’s internal struggle hammered home the trauma he’d lived and was currently living.
This book lost me sometimes. It wavered between first person and third person and here and there and then and now, all in a way that was occasionally hard to follow. But I always found my way back. The result is a book that feels very literary and cerebral (I’m not surprised to see that Adiga previously won the Booker Prize, as nominated books tend to feel that way). So it takes a little more work, but it turned out to be worth it to me in the end.
It’s not too hard to find stories about illegal immigrants during their journey, or right after. I have read far fewer stories about their daily lives once they arrive. The way they are hunted, haunted, afraid, empowered and disempowered, surrounded by both comrades and foes. This book painted a portrait of an exhausting life that is still yet worth living. And for that, I’m grateful.
Trigger Warnings
Violence / murder
Racism and racial slurs
Islamophobia
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