I regret to say that I don’t think this book is worthy of the Man Booker prize it won in 2008. I can only think it superficially ticked enough boxes to persuade the judges – first novel, non-white, non-English author, disadvantaged first-person narrator, and presenting a picture of India at odds with the favoured Western view of a dynamic emerging economy seen through a Bollywood lens. Adiga’s India is uniformly greedy, corrupt and violent with no redeeming features.

But that’s not why I don’t like it. The trouble is, the book’s badly written. There’s not a single rounded character in it – they are all one-dimensional shadow-puppets. So there is no-one for the reader to relate to: it’s hard even to start to care what happens to any of them. Granted, the climax of the book (a murder) is well trailed so there is some incentive to keep reading, but that’s about all.

As I read I wondered whether I was being too harsh. After all, it’s not easy to write a novel in the first person. But then I remembered how well Ishiguro does it in Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, or When we were Orphans – and more recently Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. White Tiger just isn’t in the same league.

This book is an impressive achievement. Despite its length, Seth keeps his reader engaged throughout. Every character in the complex, interwoven story is finely observed and detailed with sensitivity and gentle humour. The book covers a period of a little over a year at the time soon after India’s independence, and spans Indian society from top (Nehru makes an appearance as a character) to bottom. Having finished the book I feel I know far more about Indian society and culture than before – and I suspect that even so I have only just scratched the surface.

My only quibble with the story is the ending, where the main story of the title which unfolds through the book seems to be resolved rather hastily compared with the careful and detailed development of this and the sub-plots in the main body of the book. It would be unkind to think that Seth suddenly tired of his subject, or became worried about the length of the book, but Lata’s final decision on her "Suitable Boy" seemed to me inexplicably hasty. I was left speculating over the possibility of her choice somehow reflecting a move towards a new era in India’s development, but this still feels unsatisfactory. Perhaps I need to read the last part again.