RAG Demo

Tag: Epistolary novel

  • The White Tiger

    Over seven nights, Balram Halwai writes to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier due to visit India, to explain the real story of Indian enterprise. Born in a village in Bihar's so-called Darkness, pulled out of school to break coal in a tea shop, Balram talks his way into a job as driver for the son of a local landlord and follows his employers to Delhi.

    There he lives in a basement among mosquitoes, watches his masters bribe ministers, and absorbs the habits of servitude that Adiga calls the Rooster Coop. The novel is framed as a confession, so readers know early that Balram has done something drastic to escape; the tension lies in how humiliation, ambition and his master's guilty liberalism push him there.

    Sharp, sardonic and fast, the book was a rebuttal to cheerful stories of India Shining, exposing corruption and class contempt through a narrator who is funny and morally unsettling. It won the Booker Prize in 2008 as Adiga's debut and was filmed by Ramin Bahrani for Netflix in 2021.

    Book details

    AuthorAravind Adiga
    First published2008
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)276
    SettingLaxmangarh in Bihar, Dhanbad, Delhi and Bangalore, 2000s
    AwardsBooker Prize 2008

    Themes

    • Class and servitude
    • Corruption
    • Ambition
    • Rural poverty
    • Moral compromise

    Who should read it

    Readers who like dark satire and want a fierce, entertaining look at inequality in modern India.

  • Dracula

    Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to the Carpathian Mountains to help Count Dracula complete the purchase of an estate near London. His host is courteous but strange, and Harker gradually realises he is a prisoner in a castle where the Count crawls down walls and three spectral women haunt the rooms.

    The story then moves to England, where Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra become entangled in a series of disturbing events after a ship runs aground at Whitby with its crew dead. Lucy's suitors, the asylum doctor John Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, call in the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing, whose knowledge of folklore and science may be their only defence.

    Told through diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings and phonograph records, the novel creates suspense from fragments that the characters must piece together. It drew on Eastern European vampire legend and Victorian anxieties about sexuality, disease, immigration and modern technology, and its count became the template for the vampire in popular culture.

    Book details

    AuthorBram Stoker
    First published1897
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHorror
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)418
    SettingTransylvania, Whitby and London, 1890s

    Themes

    • Good and evil
    • Sexuality
    • Fear of the foreign
    • Science versus superstition
    • Modernity

    Who should read it

    Horror fans who want the original vampire novel and readers who enjoy stories pieced together from documents.