Sorry to start with a cliche, but wow. I have never been to India and I'm only somewhat familiar with Delhi. I didn't know anything about Mumbai before I read this. Sure, there's Slumdog Millionaire, but I haven't read the book and all I got from the movie was that there are very, very poor people living in slums next door to very luxurious buildings. Which also happens to be the case in Bangkok and Rio de Janeiro and other places. If you want to see, hear, smell, taste, truly experience Mumbai [...]

A ruthless property developer offers an attractive buyout to the people living in a crumbling 50 years old apartment building located in a prime land in Mumbai where he plans to build a high rise to make a killing. All the families in the building accept the offer except Yogesh Murthi, a retired teacher known as Masterji, who wants to live there with the memories of his deceased wife. The story goes on to tell what happened to Masterji and the building.In this well written story Adiga explores t [...]

The first thing, the inevitable thing, is the comparison to The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga's first book that won the Man Booker Prize. (Side note: I have no idea about the awards most books win and don't really use those as a reason for reading - or not reading - a book.)I thought The White Tiger packed a punch, it was in your face, fast-paced None of these characteristics are present in this book. This book has more of a slow, trickling effect. It kind of creeps up on you and then leaves you de [...]

This is the worst book I read in 2015! I really like to give books a go before I will trash them or stop reading them but and I gave this book all the chances but each time I kept hating it. It's very rare that I'll pick up a book and not understand the storyline but this book consistently had me scratching my head and wondering what the heck I'd just read.There are too many characters in this book and none of them are easy to keep a track on as the author likes to chop and change so randomly I [...]

I liked The White Tiger, I loved Between the Assassinations, but I adored Last Man in Tower. I think part of the reason this book was so poignant to me was the clear connection between the characters in this book and real life. My grandmother's society in Bandra East is about to be dismantled and pretty much everything that is happening in this story may very well be happening in real life. In the spirit of RK Narayan and Rohinton Mistry, Aravind Adiga's Vishram Society is so true-to-life; the c [...]

What a massive disappointment. I was a huge fan of The White Tiger, but other than being set in India this book has nothing in common with its predecessor. There is no humor, no great sense of place, the characters never get stuck in the reader's imagination, and the preachy, didactic nature of the novel just grates on the nerves after awhile. The painful over-exposition throughout the dialogue was particularly surprising for a writer of Adiga's talent. He doesn't trust his readers to figure any [...]

As somebody who is living in India, I have experienced the massive real estate growth that has taken place in India in the last few years. Buying a home was a middle class aspiration for a long time and one which people strove for in their life.Slowly but surely, this dream is getting out of reach for a majority of Indian people. Property prices have sky-rocketed in cities leaving ordinary middle class aspirants reeling. Just a cursory look at how the business is conducted in India shows how uno [...]

I'm a little surprised by many of the tepid reviews here. I was truly impressed with Aravind Adiga's ability to write a literate, plot-driven tragicomedy that manages to ask some big questions. The novel is funny, literate, bitter, and profound, and it deserves our attention and respect.The plot is pretty straightforward. Occupants of a cooperative apartment building are offered a small fortune by a developer so he can tear their building down and build a new luxury apartment tower. However, the [...]

Falling“Last Man in Tower” may not be a book you’ll enjoy reading but will probably be a book you’ll feel rewarded for finishing. As we’ve learned to expect from Adiga the book is incredibly well written and the characters have depth. It’s not a pretty world they inhabit though. Money appears to be the main theme of this book but in my opinion it’s only a vehicle for more personally important themes such as human dignity, respect, and betrayal. “Tower” is rife with metaphor. On [...]

Adiga's constellation of Vishram Society inhabitants are well furnished with religious backgrounds, family histories, personalities and motives, but efforts to foresee the twists in the tale are foiled by human unpredictability. Heroes and villains reveal unexpected facets throughout; the murderer finds a conscience; the friend tears up the token and changes sides; the loving mother goes absolutely all the way for her disabled sonOn reflection, I've come back to thinking how it's structures that [...]

I really enjoy Aravind Adiga’s writing. He knows how to convey subtle yet poignant humor, and large messages through deceptively simple stories – particularly relating to greed and corruption.This book lost me a little bit because there were so many characters. I kept getting Mrs. Rego and Mrs. Puri confused, ditto for Mr. Ajwani and Mr. Kudwa, and the various children were all a bit of a mish-mash. The central conflict of the novel struck me as a bit unnecessary. Masterji, an elderly reside [...]

A couple years ago author AravindAdiga had a big critical and commercial hit with the Man Booker winning The White Tiger. It was a funny, gritty, grisly, wonderful, contemporary Horatio Alger/ Kind Hearts and Coronets story set in India. Adiga’s new novel, Last Man In Tower, can be described with all the same adjectives (and then some) except this time he’s not creating his version of a dark rags to riches story but the classic Kaufman and Hart play, You Can’t Take It With You.The tower it [...]

Somehow I feel something about his nation of birth has rubbed him (Arvind Adiga) very wronglyI see only a pessimistic view of most things and the same views get translated into words in his storiesI pretty much did not like "White Tiger" and really honestly wondered how it deserved the Booker Prize, but this one is also nothing great to write aboutThe plot looked interesting from the back-page hence I went on to read it. The start of the story is also intersting, the description of the mohalla, [...]

I loved "White Tiger" by this author and decided I had to read this newer book. I did not like it as much, however, it did contain a lot of the same things I liked about this author's writing style from White Tiger.I was not totally drawn into this book's plot as much as I was hoping. I thought it was a bit too long and just not quite gripping enough. I found the ending to not be completely convincing, in terms of these peoples' moral failings. So that was an issue--I definitely did not find it [...]

I gave this book four stars not because I was head over heels in love with it, but because it lead me to have profound thoughts about the condition of humanity. While this book was required reading for me in generaladuate school, there were many times when I wanted to throw it clear across the room out of frustration and anger at the characters' actions. For a full review, visit my blog, On The Shelf.

Adiga's acerbic and darkly funny debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Booker Prize, so expectations are high for this one. I quite liked the earlier book for its unabashed class warfare plotline and compelling moral ambiguity. This one deals with similar themes: invoking the aspirations of rich, poor, and middle class in a story revolving around a developer's attempt to buy out the residents of an old building in Mumbai so he can tear it down and build a luxury condo. The catch is that acc [...]

You may be wondering why I have all these five star books. No, I am not easily pleased, but life being what it is, who has time to review mediocre stuff? Share the good! Share the worthwhile! And this novel is definitely worthwhile.I liked "Last Man in Tower" better than "The White Tiger"--A book I enjoyed a lot. "Last Man" is just as gritty and compelling, and carries that same sort of horror factor that "White Tiger" did. Not horror in terms of zombies, but horror in seeing what people can bec [...]

Here's Russell Peters on being Indian:All my life I've been identifying myself as an Indian man. I'm always like, I'm Indian. What are you? I'm Indian. Where you from? I'm Indian. What do you mean, where am I from? I'm Indian. And then I realised something. I was born and raised in Canada. There's nothing Indian about me! The only thing Indian about me are my parents and my skin tone. That's it! Culturally, I'm not Indian at all. And the only reason I know this is because last year I went to Ind [...]

By Aravind Adiga. Grade: BAsk any Bombaywallah about Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society and you will be told that it is unimpeachably pucca. Despite its location close to the airport and bordered by slums, it has been pucca for some fifty years. But then Bombay has changed in half a century – not least its name – and the world in which Tower A was first built is giving way to a new city, a Mumbai of new development and new money; of wealthy Indians returning with fortunes ma [...]

There is a point when Adiga’s latest suddenly comes to life. The man last holding out in the tower block, not prepared to sell to a developer, seems to have run out of ways to fight the builder whilst others in the block are desperate that they might have miss the deadline for accepting the builder’s deadline and prepare to try and force the old man’s hand. The story gains dynamism, strength and tension. Sadly, by this point I was about three-quarters of the way through the book.It isn’t [...]

This is the second book of Aravind Adiga’s that I have read, after thoroughly enjoying his Man Booker prize winning novel The White Tiger which I also recommend. In this novel we meet a host of colourful characters who are living happily in a tower block in Mumbai despite the occasional shabbiness and state of repair of their apartments. Unfortunately, change is coming in the shape of a ruthless property developer called Dharmen Shah who offers a life-changing amount of money to the residents [...]

My Take: This was a book that left me devastated in the end. It was kind of reading an adult version of Lord of the Flies in a different setting.The book is set in Vakola, Mumbai and focuses on the residents of Vishram Society. The apartment complexes that make up the Society are eyed by Shah, a real estate developer who plans to build his dream there. His efforts to clear the buildings in order to realize his dream – by making generous (in the real estate world) financial offers to the reside [...]

I read this book complusively. I have witnessed first hand the real estate growth in India. I have seen the naked greed and aspirations of the middle class (of which I am a part too). I have seen the extreme religiosity and the erosion of moral values (morality and religion are not to be confused here). Adiga takes all this and packages it in a compelling tale of desire, greed and ambition. I could almost see the characters living and breathing. It was a visual read. This is one book that is scr [...]

With subtlety, Aravind Adiga tells the story of an apartment building of home-owners offered the chance to sell their building to a developer and move onwards to find their new homes and/or dreams. But one man wants to stay. Slowly, his neighbours pressure him to change his mind. None of this is a spoiler. It's all on the back of the book in the blurb. What's surprising is how these people change in such slow, normal, understandable ways that their behaviour almost appears completely normal. Sca [...]

Top-notch.Adiga's third novel is more like his second (though it was written first), "Between the Assassinations" with its large cast of characters, and intersecting plotlines, albeit more focused, centering on a single story. It is the biggest hearted of his novels, as well: "White Tiger" was incendiary with rage; "Between The Assassinations" had the same white-hot core, though was more diffuse at its edges.Here, Adiga continues to explore modern India's radical economic inequality, but the ant [...]

I love these kind of books, which explore human nature at its worse to see how far you can push people to the limit before they break, and Adiga does a wonderful job at that. I loved reading about Vishram members and see them change over the course of the book, until you couldn't recognise them anymore. It's a cruel world out there, and money is tempting for poor to middle class families that only want a better life. It's interesting to see what people do to get what they want, regardless of eve [...]

quattro stelle e mezza, 5 se non avesse tirato un po' in lunga la fine. Bella scrittura, storia che cattura, dinamiche psicologiche spiegate in modo molto credibile. Che si fa per soldi! L'unica persona alla quale rimane il senso della giustizia, la capacità di commuoversi per i più deboli, affetto e altruismo è un ragazzo down. Tutti gli altri, delle vere iene. bella l'ambientazione a mumbai, il tratteggio dei personaggi minori, le semplici comparse. Bel libro!

Loved this book! For the first time in my life I want to visit India. Not that this is a pleasant depiction of life there, quite the contrary, but it is so overwhelming ; the smells, sounds, people. Although you think when you start reading, that you know what will happen, I found the twists and turns of the story, and the complexity of the characters, meant that I could not predict the next page, let alone the end.An absorbing read, a realistic read, a perceptive view of human nature.

The city of Bombay, on one hand, has many old buildings many of which are dilapidated and on the verge of collapsing. To facilitate the rebuilding of such structures the government has formulated a law called Transfer of Development Rights by which the residents of the Housing Society of the building can transfer rights to a builder who will build a new building for them. To finance this project the builder will buy extra area (equal to the current area of flats that can be built on the land) fr [...]

Ich habe dieses Buch vor einigen Jahren auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse entdeckt und war vom interessanten Klappentext, sowie dem tollen Schreibstil der ersten Buchseiten total begeistert. Als ich „Letzter Mann im Turm“ nun vor einigen Wochen zu lesen begann, erwartete ich ein Indienepos, das mich sowohl inhaltlich als sprachlich begeistern würde. Außerdem hoffte ich, einen Einblick in den indischen Alltag zu bekommen und dieses exotische Land dadurch besser kennenzulernen.Vor allem im letzt [...]