Feuds over property and deadly clashes over land are as much a part of India's economic rise as call centers and the foreign acquisitions made by its leading companies.

The background of millions of personal struggles between the forces of economic development and those clinging to their homes has been taken up by one of India's brightest young literary talents in his second novel.

Aravind Adiga, whose debut novel The White Tiger won the Booker prize in 2008, sets his new book in a scruffy tower block in his adopted home of Mumbai, a swirling mass of 16 million people, slums, apartment buildings and Bollywood.

The plot revolves around the battle between a hard-nosed property magnate, who wants to knock down the cooperative housing tower to build a new luxury development, and a minority of older residents who resist his lucrative offer.

"It poses some very fundamental questions about democracy in India. I tend to side with the person who refuses to take the money, but he's frustrating the aims of the other people," Adiga says.

"This stuck me as crucial not just to Mumbai, but everything that is happening in India," he adds ahead of the launch of the book, titled Last Man in Tower.

Land acquisition has emerged as one of the biggest political issues in India and a pressing economic problem as companies and governments consistently clash with protesters over large development projects.

Car company Tata Motors abandoned a proposed factory in 2008 in the face of demonstrations by farmers, and the country's biggest foreign direct investment project, by South Korean steelmaker Posco, has been stalled for six years.

In June several farmers died in a protest over compensation for land acquired to build a new highway linking New Delhi and the Taj Mahal city of Agra, the latest fatalities in a long-running dispute.

"These issues come up anywhere in the world where you're having a new road built or a new stadium," says Adiga, who was the New Delhi-based correspondent for Time magazine before turning to fiction.

"In India it's more visceral because it's for the most part a developing country. For a man to say 'no' to a large sum of money strikes me as an extraordinary thing."

And millions of farmers in overcrowded India are adamant they will not move from their ancestral property in the name of industrialization.

Adiga's second novel is a more complex undertaking than the punchy White Tiger and again demonstrates his role as a unique chronicler of contemporary India at a time of wrenching change.

It returns to some of the themes that propelled him to fame, including his savage take on the new middle class and his brutally frank descriptions of the grime and deprivation that characterize much of the country.

Questions:

1 What is Aravind Adiga’s new novel about?

2 What is he famous for?

3 What was his job before he started writing fiction?

Answers:

1. Personal struggles between the forces of economic development and those clinging to their homes

2. His debut novel The White Tiger won the Booker prize in 2008

3. He was the New Delhi-based correspondent for Time magazine.

（中國(guó)日?qǐng)?bào)網(wǎng)英語點(diǎn)津 Julie 編輯）

About the broadcaster:

Nelly Min is an editor at China Daily with more than 10 years of experience as a newspaper editor and photographer. She has worked at major newspapers in the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press. She is also fluent in