Between The Assassinations - Aravind Adiga

Kittur, a small town in south India is conceived and mapped with brilliant precision. What emerges is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv.
The book is an intense examination of Kittur: its languages, its diversity of caste, class and religion, and the many hierarchies within and between them, its black and white economies, the way its geography reveals its history, and the human encounters and non-encounters that determine the texture of its everyday life.
Somewhat similar to R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi, but Adiga’s slashing style of writing makes for an atmosphere worlds away from Narayan's gentler ironies and greater tolerance for life’s injustices. Adiga’s theme is power relations—between rich and poor, master and servant, high caste and low caste, majority and minority—and, as a consequence of these relations, moral wickedness and inferior rage.
Adiga has amazed me again with this book. I read that this was written before the White Tiger but was lapped up by publishers only after the Booker..