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    The Accidental Apprentice: A Novel
    The Accidental Apprentice: A Novel
    The Accidental Apprentice: A Novel
    Ebook431 pages7 hours

    The Accidental Apprentice: A Novel

    By Vikas Swarup

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Vikas Swarup, acclaimed author of Slumdog Millionaire and Six Suspects, has written a compelling, suspenseful tale about the lure of money and the power of dreams. The Accidental Apprentice is international crime fiction at its most entertaining.

    In life you never get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.

    A business empire worth ten billion dollars. This is the tantalizing offer made by Vinay Mohan Acharya, one of India's richest men, to Sapna Sinha, a simple salesgirl in an electronics store in downtown Delhi. She can be the next CEO of his incredibly huge and profitable company. There is only one catch—she needs to pass seven tests from the "textbook of life."

    Thus begins the most challenging journey Sapna has ever undertaken, one that will take her from her swanky showroom to the heat and dust of India's backstreets and villages. Along the way she encounters a host of memorable personalities, from a vain Bollywood superstar to a kleptomaniac Gandhian. But are the seven tests real or is Acharya playing a game driven by a perverse fantasy?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 8, 2014
    ISBN9781466844292
    The Accidental Apprentice: A Novel
    Author

    Vikas Swarup

    VIKAS SWARUP is the author of Slumdog Millionaire (previously published as Q & A), which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia), won the Boeke Prize (South Africa) and was made into a celebrated feature film that won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. He has been a member of the Indian Foreign Service for over thirty years and was recently appointed as High Commissioner of India to Canada. He is also the author of the novels Six Suspects and The Accidental Apprentice. His books have been translated into over forty languages.

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    Reviews for The Accidental Apprentice

    3.5/5

    6 ratings5 reviews

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    • 1/5
      I agree with the reviewers who found this book disappointing. I really enjoyed Q & A and rushed to buy this as soon as I noticed it. But I not just disappointed, I am very annoyed. Because I always finish a book I have started, I finished this. From the off it was silly and it just got worse and worse. Implausible is a gross understatement of this book's key fault.
      Vikas Swarup is now promoted to number one on my do not read list!
    • 3/5
      A disappointment. After two great books, Vikas Swarup went rather rudimentary in this novel. It's moderately engaging, but so basic, as if written by a novice and not the author of "Q & A / Slumdog Millionaire" and "Six Suspects". I am baffled.
    • 3/5
      And quite accidentally did I read a book from the Slumdog Millionaire famed Vikas Swarup. I am always skeptic picking up a book by any Indian author or about India in general; the former for the fear of being badly written (I know that sounds kind of racist, but in my experience that often turns out to be the case) and the latter for generally playing to the stereotypes (regardless of the author being Indian or not).Hence I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this book, which suffered from neither of the two flaws mentioned here-in-above, it was fast-paced, action filled (not the violent kind, generally), quite the page turner. "Why only a 3* then?", the curious may ask. Well, for one, it was too dramatic! It would require a complete denial of the laws of probability to accept this book, even in the loose world of fiction. Everything that is possible in this world, is experienced by the protagonist, and all within the space of a year. Even Rand in Wheel of Time series saw less excitement, his Ta'veren status not withstanding! (The seemingly random reference to the Wheel of Time series will become clear, come the next paragraph.)Over a casual discussion about this book in a cafe, a business and now personal acquaintance of mine, on hearing my objections with regard to the realism of the book, raised a very pertinent question, "But you read Sci-Fi, don't you?" I told her that a well written Sci-Fi or Fantasy book is almost always logically consistent, the amount of details that go into the world building is beyond what a book like this one can hope to achieve. To her credit, she grasped this point immediately, instinctively even, despite her not being a reader of either of these two genres.The second shortcoming, if I may be allowed to call it that, was the shallow development of characters of all, but the protagonist. Swarup barely scratched the surface of all his characters, showcasing only the superficial of traits in each of them.It is obvious that Swarup is one of those rare Indian authors who can write some really good stuff, but given the massive fame he has already accumulated, I am not too optimistic about him changing / moderating his writing style.
    • 3/5
      I am a big fan of Vikas Swarup's Q & A, the book upon which the movie Slumdog Millionaire is very loosely based; in fact, I will be teaching it again this fall in a gen ed lit course. So, naturally, I was eager to read his latest novel. Sadly, it did not live up to his first.Like [Q & A], Swarup has created a frame around which to build his story. In the former, it was a series of questions the protagonist is asked on a game show; here, it is seven tests that the protagonist must pass in order to be named CEO of a huge company, a prize that will enable her to leave her boring, low-paying job in an electronics store and to provide for her widowed mother and younger sister. Both story lines are a bit fantastic, but this one lacks the delight in coincidence that figured into Q & A. Instead, Sapna is put to a series of grueling tests--without ever knowing until they are over that they actually were tests. Some of them border on downright cruelty. Sapna is warned that the final test will be the most difficult. It certainly is--but it is also way over the top and unbelievable, as is the final resolution.
    • 3/5
      Sapna is an ordinary girl working at an electronics store in New Delhi. When visiting the temple one day, she meets a billionaire industrialist who tells her that he would like to make her the CEO of his company, but that if she agrees she first needs to pass seven "tests" of character. Sapna is highly sceptical but agrees. What follows is a series of mishaps and adventures, each of which turn out to have been part of the apprenticeship. The story also allows Swarup to touch on many issues in current day India, such as corruption, forced marriages and child labour.This is a fast paced story. Sapna gets through the first six tests, but just when it seems that the final prize might be within her grasp, things spiral rapidly out of control and it turns out that many things and people have not been what they seemed to be.Vikas Swarup is the author of Q & A which became the movie Slumdog Millionaire [DVD] and he plays with the movie's success. The main character of Slumdog Millionaire is referred to a few times as a prominent and very wealthy industrialist, but then at another point in the book, someone is asked if they saw the film Slumdog Millionaire.Ultimately this book - while undoubtably entertaining - didn't work for me. Too many coincidences, too many unlikely characters, no sense of realism. However it is still quite a lot of fun.

    Book preview

    The Accidental Apprentice - Vikas Swarup

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