A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar: Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Pick | Longlisted for the National Book Award | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Megha Majumdar's follow-up to her celebrated New York Times bestseller A Burning arrives with serious literary credentials: an Oprah's Book Club selection, a National Book Award longlisting, and a Kirkus Prize nomination. The anticipation, it turns out, is entirely warranted. The novel takes place in a near-future Kolkata, a city buckling under floods and food shortages, where climate collapse isn't a distant warning but an immediate, daily fact of life. Ma, her toddler daughter, and her ageing father are hours away from boarding a flight to Michigan, where her husband is waiting. Visas secured, bags packed. Then morning comes, and the purse containing all their immigration documents is gone. What follows unfolds across a single week, told through two interwoven perspectives. Ma's story is one of mounting desperation: hunting for a thief whilst stretching the last of their food through a worsening shortage. The other belongs to Boomba, the thief himself, a man whose love for his own family has pushed him into a spiral of increasingly reckless decisions, each one carrying consequences he hasn't begun to reckon with. Majumdar writes with a precision that keeps you slightly off-balance in the best way. The pacing is taut, but she never sacrifices her characters to plot. Both Ma and Boomba act from the same raw instinct, the fierce, irrational drive to protect the people they love, which makes their collision genuinely painful to watch unfold. A piercing, propulsive novel from one of contemporary fiction's most compelling voices.
- Author: Megha Majumdar
- Publisher: Penguin Hamish Hamilton
- Genre: Mystery
- ISBN: 978-0143477730
- Pages: 224 pages