Selection Day

A Novel

By: Aravind Adiga

Narrated by: Sartaj Garewal

From Aravind Adiga, the best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger, a dazzling new novel about two brothers in a Mumbai slum who are raised by their obsessive father to become cricket stars and whose coming of age threatens their relationship, future, and sense of themselves.

Manjunath Kumar is 14 and living in a slum in Mumbai. He knows he is good at cricket - if not as good as his older brother, Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling, and is fascinated by curious scientific facts and the world of CSI. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn't know. Sometimes it even seems as though everyone has a clear idea of who Manju should be except Manju himself. When Manju meets Radha's great rival, a mysterious Muslim boy privileged and confident in all the ways Manju is not, everything in Manju's world begins to change, and he is faced by decisions that will challenge his understanding of it as well as his own self.

Filled with unforgettable characters from across India's social strata - the old scout everyone calls Tommy Sir; Anand Mehta, the big-dreaming investor; Sofia, a wealthy, beautiful girl and the boys' biggest fan - this book combines the best of The Art of Fielding and Slumdog Millionaire for a compulsive, moving story of adolescence and ambition, fathers, sons, and brothers. Selection Day is Adiga's most absorbing, big-hearted novel to date and proves why "with his gripping, amusing glimpse into the contradictions and perils of modern India, Aravind Adiga has cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of his country's messy present" (Newsweek).

©2017 Aravind Adiga (P)2017 Simon & Schuster

Nuanced and surprising

I greatly enjoyed "WhiteTiger" and this is perhaps even better because it deals with brothers and love. Adiga has a feel for India that compares with Flannery O'Conner's feel for the American South.

Great novel!

I read White Tiger and could not put it down. i decided to try this novel by Adiga. It is really excellent, The narrator is really good, easy to understand and and makes the novel come to life. The transition are superb, so it is easy to follow. The number of characters are manageable and all are well developed. i dound myself rooting for my favorites' success. A bit of the story about sex made me feel uncomfortable, but that may just be me.

Cartoonish narration

Would you be willing to try another one of Sartaj Garewal’s performances?

I really don't like this narrator, whom I try to avoid, and who made this novel sound like an episode of South Park. It's a satirical novel, not an idiotic one. Are there no other South Asian voice actors?

Coming of age story

Reading that India’s team is currently in the Cricket World Cup 2019, I’m reminded of Selection Day by Aravind Adiga. Manjunath (14) and older brother, Radha, live with their father in the slums of Mumbai where becoming a professional cricket player is the dream of every little boy. Although they love one another, they are highly competitive and pitted against one another by their father who clearly has a favorite son. As a result, their relationship is often at odds due to their overly-ambitious, unhinged father, a man who has not outgrown his own childhood dream of being a professional player and is shoving his dreams down the throat of his two sons. A man who dreams of escaping the slums on the backs of his son's success. Although the father expects Radha to become the “best batsman in the world” (with Manju to become the “second best batsman in the world”) things don’t go as planned. Perhaps this is because Manju doesn’t really care about Cricket as much as he cares about science, so he doesn’t feel the same pressures to excel.

In addition to the demands and superstitions of their father, both boys are struggling with the challenges of everyday life: class resentment, school, sibling competition, love, peer pressure and managing the expectations and demands of their deranged father. Spanning over 14 years, Selection Day is a coming-of-age story that is at once beautiful, unpredictable and tragic. I found the book hard to follow as the game of cricket (which is know nothing about) is very much a part of the story. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

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this was overall disappointing

the audio book was hard to follow most of the times. the voices the narrator made were annoying at times

came here from the Netflix series and boy am I disappointed.

there are various subplots that seem to build but go nowhere

Disappointing and Depressing

I bought this book because I loved The White Tiger so much. If that is what you are looking for forget it. I don't know anything about cricket and don't care about it so all the cricket references lost me. I think that it is a very well written book, but I was anxious for it to be over because it was just very sad to me.