A fanged and toothed creature called hope

Megha Majumdar's second novel, set in a famine-stricken Kolkata of the near future, far surpasses her debut

- Nandini Nair

The critics got it wrong. Many of the world’s leading literary commentators hailed Megha Majumdar’s debut A Burning (2020) as a propulsive thriller, a “brief, brave novel”, as James Wood called it in The New Yorker.

While A Burning has memorable characters such as Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in modern-day India with big dreams, who is shattered by an evil system, it often falters in voice and pace, and did seem like it was written for a non-Indian readership. But it is in her new novel, A Guardian and a Thief, that Majumdar comes into her own. It truly deserves all the hosannas she received from critics for her first, as it upends easy notions of right and wrong. It is one of the finest novels of the year, because it does a complex thing and it does it well—it shows us how we are all guardians, and we are all thieves.

In a 2020 interview, Majumdar, who worked as an editor for Catapult, said that when she read the drafts of her debut, she was always aware of moments when her attention would slip and she'd be tempted to pick up her phone to scroll, adding, “that feeling of boredom is devastating to a writer.” To fine-tune her first novel, Majumdar (who was born and brought up in India, and has spent nearly two decades in the US) tried to tighten the slack. It is perhaps that fear that ensures that A Guardian and a Thief seldom flags in pace or vitality. Boring, this novel is not.