In Sydney, an illegal immigrant who works as a cleaner begins to suspect that one of his customers killed another, but calling the police could lead to his deportation, in Aravind Adiga's Amnesty.
Throughout a single long day the cleaner debates about what to do, all the time being goaded via cell phone by the suspected killer to come clean his apartment before he decamps.
He relives his experiences in Sydney, from hiding in a storeroom above a grocery to meeting his girlfriend on a vegan dating website to getting too involved in the explosive relationship between his two clients, who pay cash and know his status is precarious.
Adiga's novel has a thread of thriller woven through it, but really is a literary novel focusing on the immigrant experience in all its facets.
I had previously read Adiga's Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger which deals with an Indian cab driver who carries on a one-sided correspondence with the Premier of China; the protagonist here also is an eccentric character and somewhat unreliable narrator prone to flights of fancy, which makes for an interesting read.
A worthwhile literary work that I checked out from the New Castle-Henry County Bookmobile and read quickly.
