A Guardian and a Thief

I almost passed on this one. I wasn't sure I had the bandwidth for another near-future dystopia with a message. But I'm really glad I gave it a shot.

Throughout the book I found many lines that made me smile, and others that blew me away, like this one:

"The depth of night always felt adjacent to real life, a fourth dimension of the world that allowed the honesty and courage that daylight forbade."

This is a dual narrative set over the course of a single week in a near-future Kolkata collapsing under famine and climate catastrophe. Ma's family has their passports stolen days before they are able to emigrate to Michigan. The teenager named Boomba who took them is desperate in ways Ma can't fully see from her vantage point.

I was pleasantly surprised at how charming the voice of the book is. Majumdar captures the internal lives of both characters precisely, without overwriting. Both Ma and Boomba are operating from the same ferocious love for their families, and the novel's central tension is that neither of them is wrong, exactly.

The architecture of the novel is precise — every detail doubles as social commentary: the visas, the shelter, the billionaire benefactor, the food Ma skims for her own family.

Majumdar occasionally tells you what she's already shown you, but her detail work is strong enough to overlook it.

A two-year-old asking for "flowerflower" because she's just discovered cauliflower. An old man who doesn't want to leave Kolkata but won't say so because his love for his daughter runs deeper than his grief. These are the details that make a short novel feel full, and make it a National Book Award finalist that actually deserves the distinction.