It's no wonder Aravind Adiga locates all four of his books in India, rather than Sydney, New York, or Oxford, the cities where he was educated. Not only is the South Asian market vast, the languages and religions are multiple, and the politics seethe with fictional potential. He has a large international English audience as well for his novels, which get better and better. Readers everywhere can delight in the Indian verbosity, the elaborate insults, and the slightly mangled English, some of it "delivered with a lopsided grin and an unstable head".

Adiga, who won the Man Booker Prize for The White Tiger, knows the anxieties and strategies of middle-class India intimately, and all his novels take us there. In the latest, Selection Day, the perimeter fence around the middle class is breached by two motherless brothers from the slums of Mumbai, whose father is determined that they will be India's best and second-best "batters". This they are on the way to becoming when Radha, the elder, gets distracted by girls and re-enacts his father's violence, and Manju, the younger, who could have a future in science, is led astray by a gay fellow-cricketer.

Manju, who is prone to agree with the last authority-figure he has spoken to, vacillates between study and cricket, between Tommy Sir, his coach, and Javed, his potential lover, who is a Muslim. Manju prays for help to the god of cricket and also to the god of chemistry. What he will decide to do provides the impetus of the story, and as the day for selecting the squad of India's future cricketers approaches, Manju's indecision torments him even as it has the reader hanging on the outcome of his selection.

Selection Day is not unrelievedly confined to Slumdog Millionaire territory. The brothers soon pull in enough money from a wealthy promoter and from television appearances to move with their father into an air-conditioned apartment. But they are several rungs on the social ladder below Javed, who is reading "The Animal Farm", as he calls it, and who urges Manju not to be a slave to "pro-puh-gun-duh" and cricket.

Javed is as manipulative and two-faced as Manju is conflicted. Moreover, Manju learns from TV that the "increasingly fashionable practice of homosexuality" is sanctioned neither by the Indian Penal Code nor by a thousand years of Hindu civilisation. In Islam, of course, it doesn't exist. But as the boys' patron says: "Nothing's illegal in India, because, technically, everything's illegal in India."

Coach Tommy Sir worries that polygamous Indian Muslims will soon "swamp" the country with their fecundity and fundamentalism. This is not the only sideways nod to Australia, where Adiga visits friends regularly, and acknowledges his support base. Bradman's birthplace in Bowral is mentioned, and Steve Waugh is glimpsed in India signing autographs. But cricket is a new subject for Adiga, and he has suggested in interviews that this is the first Indian novel about it. Well, yes for India but no for Sri Lanka.

In 2012 Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman was published, about a bowler as prodigious as the batsman Manju, who is similarly tormented by those who control the cricket industry. Pradeep Mathew, too, flees at the height of his success, but unlike Manju who only runs away for a few days, Pradeep goes to New Zealand and disappears for good.

Karunatilaka's account of cricket tragics trying to make a film about him, including about his experiences in Australia, is hilarious. Adiga's Indian story is on the wry side of amusing, but the social, economic, and environmental preoccupations readers have come to expect of him take it to another level of enlightenment.