RaveThe GuardianAnyone who enjoyed Hillenbrand\'s previous book, Seabiscuit, will know that she has a fine line in compelling narrative. Unbroken is no different: meticulously researched and powerful. The reader, unlike the airmen, would rather the days adrift went on longer ... In Zamperini...Hillenbrand has discovered a man of complexity and wisdom who can look back from his great age and see the pattern of his life emerge ... Here is the story that few PoW books have bothered to tell: of a man struggling to escape an inescapable past ... Hillenbrand marches second world war literature right back into the spotlight.
Aravind Adiga
MixedThe GuardianAravind Adiga's first novel is couched as a cocksure confession from a deceitful, murderous philosopher runt who has the brass neck to question his lowly place in the order of things … There is much to commend in this novel, a witty parable of India's changing society, yet there is much to ponder. The scales have fallen from the eyes of some Indian writers, many either living abroad, or educated there like Adiga. The home country is invariably presented as a place of brutal injustice and sordid corruption, one in which the poor are always dispossessed and victimised by their age-old enemies, the rich. Characters at the colourful extremities of society are Dickensian grotesques, Phiz sketches, adrift in a country that is lurching rapidly towards bland middle-class normality. My hunch is this is fundamentally an outsider's view and a superficial one.
