Australian teenager Larry Darrell goes on a backpacking trip to India and finds his life changed for ever. Back home he refuses the opportunities and privileges of his former life and breaks up with his fiancee Isabel. His travels seeking the meaning of chance and death take him to personal growth workshops, a fashionable ashram, the worlds of art and politics, a Buddhist monastery and an Indian saint. Meanwhile Isabel achieves wealth and status in marriage with Grey, a Queensland property developer. By the end of the 1980s they are bankrupt and disgraced. And Isabel will stop at nothing to get Larry back. Ten years later they meet again in Sydney, along with Isabel's camp, domineering uncle Elliott, their grieving, badly-behaved old friend Sophie, and Will Maugham, the playwright who narrates this story. With The Tiger is a contemporary take on the Somerset Maugham novel The Razor's Edge (1944), which popularised the idea of the Westerner's search for meaning in "spiritual India".