"Between the assassinations" is an excellent collection of short stories set in the city of Kittur in India involving the myriad of peoples who inhabit this diverse city. Like in "White Tiger" Adiga is interested in the ways class, religion, caste, and Western culture influence the people living in India. These stories are tragic, touching, and sad, revealing the many hardships of people of all different parts of society. Adiga's writing is fairly straightforward, but the subject matter of each story is compelling and he expertly portrays an entire city's worth of inhabitants in believable vignettes. He also does an excellent job of describing the city itself, its various neighborhoods, and the flavor of each area.

A few minor complaints - The map at the start of the novel is overly-simplistic and useless. A more complete map of Kittur would have been helpful since geography places an important role in these stories. Also the book ostensibly is set during the late 1980s, the book has a timeline at the end, and each chapter is assigned a day (i.e. day 1, day 2) and a time (morning, evening). None of this made any sense. These stories could be set in contemporary India (for the most part) and were not firmly connected to the time period. And the assignation of days and times to the stories served no purpose. I am not really sure what Adiga was aiming for here and the book did not need any of this.

That said, these are minor quibbles and I thoroughly enjoyed almost every story in this collection. I'm a bit surprised at some of the negative reviews on FB. I liked it!

A good quick read that is enlightening about Indian society and full of tragedy and sorrow (but in a touching, enjoyable-to-read, short story kind of way).