Aravind Adiga emerged as a powerful new voice in literature with his debut The White Tiger, a tale of the terrible lengths to which one poor Indian man will go to rise above his station, which went on to win the Man Booker Prize. Adiga's third novel, Last Man in Tower, delves into the streets of Mumbai to reveal the city through the eyes of the middle class.

It focuses on a battle between an old teacher, Masterji, who refuses to sell his apartment, and a developer, Mr. Shah, who is making an inarguably generous offer to buy the building. On the sidelines are Masterji's 20-some neighbors from Vishram Society Tower A, depicted with precision and humor. Each member of the Society has been offered a substantial selling price for their portion of the crumbling building, but without Masterji's signature, no one will get any money.

Masterji and Mr. Shah's battle is ultimately over the caste system: Masterji is traditional, a believer in "the idea of being respectable and living among similar people," while Mr. Shah has built his success on change. Each is absolute in his belief. Adiga heightens the intrigue by making neither man's narration trustworthy, as Masterji is delusional and Mr. Shah has a builder's reputation for unreliability.

Last Man in Tower races along with unstoppable suspense, going beyond the gaze of The White Tiger to explore even more of the rapidly changing India. The result is as compelling as it is complex.

Two strong-willed men, a developer and a holdout, propel this gripping second novel about real estate, greed and community in Mumbai (Bombay), India; Adiga won the Man Booker prize for his debut (The White Tiger, 2008).

There's a building in Mumbai we get to know as well as the two protagonists. Vishram Society Tower A is an unremarkable six-story structure a stone's throw from the Vakola slums. Water supply is poor. Pests necessitate visits from the "seven-kinds-of-vermin" man. Still, the building has class. The residents of this co-op are middle-class professionals, respectable people typified by Yogesh Murthy, known as Masterji, the 61-year-old retired physics teacher and recent widower. Mr. Shah is the far from respectable but hugely successful is the builder. His is a rags-to-riches story; starting with smuggling and slum clearance, he's now at the top of the heap. Vishram's two towers' proximity to the financial center attract his attention. They must be demolished to make way for his magnificent new project. Shah's buyout offer is generous, but it comes with a strict deadline; acceptance must be unanimous. There are four no votes. Masterji votes no as an act of solidarity with his dear friends the Pintos, an old married couple. Then they're threatened, and suddenly Masterji is the lone holdout. Stubborn and irascible, he is that rare individual who has no price; he wants nothing. Shah could have his enforcer cripple or kill him, but he wants the building's gossipy denizens, by now frantic for the money, to do the dirty work. With great skill, Adiga spotlights the slippery slope, as the unthinkable becomes the thinkable and finally the doable. Really, what choice do his neighbors have? The author sets us up for the kill while placing it in context: the riotous sights, sounds and smells of Mumbai.

Adiga nails the culture of corruption. How exciting to watch a writer come into his own, surpassing the achievement of his first novel.

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah wants to tear down a decrepit apartment building in Mumbai and erect luxury towers. But a teacher named Masterji refuses to move, and his formerly friendly neighbors turn on him (they want their buyouts). Adiga won the Man Booker Prize for his last novel, 2008's The White Tiger, and I found his subsequent story collection, Between the Assassinations, even more intriguing. With a reading group guide and lots of online promotion.

Adiga, author of the highly acclaimed White Tiger, returns with this morality tale about events at a respectable, solidly middle-class building in Mumbai. The veneer of respectability and hard-earned bonhomie falls away after the residents—Hindu, Christian, and Muslim—are offered a windfall by an unscrupulous real estate developer who wants them to move. It is a credit to the author that the reader manages to keep straight the large cast of unforgettable and all-too-believable characters. One resident, retired teacher and widower Masterji, holds out purely on principle—or is it for some other reason even he doesn't understand? In the end, there are no heroes in this viper's nest of competing desires and petty jealousies, as the residents' uglier natures are gradually revealed in the face of their greed and disappointment. The swarming oceanfront metropolis of Mumbai, in various stages of development and decay, functions as a character in its own right. VERDICT You won't be able to look away as the novel hurtles toward its inevitable train wreck of a conclusion in this stunner from Adiga. [See Prepub Alert, 2/28/11.]—Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

In the midst of a financial boom, a lone resident of a cosmopolitan Mumbai building holds out when his neighbors sell to a developer seeking to build an expensive high-rise. (LJ 9/1/11)

When Mumbai was still Bombay, the apartment building became the new village, inhabitants growing up and old together, intertwined in one another's rhythms and needs. Tower A of the Vishram Society is one such building—both a character and the setting in this highly allegorical yet riveting novel, Adiga's first since winning the Man Booker Prize for The White Tiger. Here, Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Communists have lived together for decades, finding recent common ground in their suspicions about the new "modern" single girl in 3B. But when a developer offers each resident an astronomical sum to move out so that he might build a luxury condo, greed threatens to destroy the community. But one holdout, the teacher Mr. Masterji, is determined that knowledge and principle will protect him. Though occasionally overwritten ("The hypodermic needle of the outside world had bent at his epidermis and never penetrated"), Adiga is a master of pacing. The momentum builds as Masterji's neighbors become consumed by money, allowing Adiga to show his characters grappling with circumstances, and enduring difficult changes of heart. Adiga takes a harsh look at Mumbai's new wealth, but his characters are more than archetypes. Though the allure of capitalism has won them over, the inhabitants of Tower A are at the mercy of the rich as much as their neighbor, the teacher, is at the mercy of them. (Sept.)