Aravind Adiga follows up his Man Booker-winning debut novel, The White Tiger, with 14 short stories set in the fictional coastal town of Kittur. While The White Tiger focuses on the rags-to-riches story of its central character, Balram the rickshaw-puller-cum-entrepreneur, Between the Assassinations features a wide array of characters, whose comings and goings Adiga documents with a critical eye.

His stories here are loosely connected, in that they all take place in the same township. Adiga has spread the thin veneer of a travel narrative over his collection to introduce the reader to the town, with the recommendation that he or she be prepared to spend six days visiting the different areas. This allows Adiga an opportunity to provide a quick historical and sociological gloss on the different communities within Kittur.

Set between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, the collection opens at the train station where a young migrant is hired to spy on government troop movements by the regional Muslim separatists. Kittur is awash in a tension that slowly builds. In the next story, Adiga adds caste conflict to the simmering racial divisions, as a rich student plants a bomb at his school in retribution for caste insults. Eventually Kittur explodes in a riot. However, in another story of an industrialist who has reluctantly reopened his garment factory, it is revealed that the riots were instigated on behalf of the local magnates. Later stories include a newspaper editor who stumbles onto the "truth" of Kittur's oligarchy, only to descend into madness.

Adiga is appreciative of similar efforts to chronicle the lives of ordinary citizens in the works of Dickens and Maupassant and updates their 19th century casts of working-class characters with modern Indian equivalents such as pirate bookseller, bus ticket-taker, mosquito sprayer and delivery boy. While the early stories are tense, Adiga has many of these characters arriving in Kittur in hopes that change is in the air. Post-riot Kittur is a different place though, one where material progress still drives increasing numbers to the small town, flooding the ranks of the unskilled urban poor, but the element of hope is gone. Several characters now dream of leaving Kittur.

Time is an intriguing factor in Between the Assassinations. While Adiga's travel narrative suggests the passing of consecutive days, it is clear that several years have passed as some stories reference the others. However we never really know how much time has passed from one story to the next. All we are sure of is that, by the end, Kittur has somehow undergone profound changes, such as the lessening of caste restrictions or a major suburban development in its formerly pristine woods, while at the same time leaving class iniquities relatively untouched.