The Tale of a Guardian, a Thief and the Fine Line Between

Megha Majumdar’s new novel follows two disastrously entangled lives in a famine-ridden future.

By Lily Meyer

A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF, by Megha Majumdar

“A Guardian and a Thief,” Megha Majumdar’s new novel, begins with an ending. Ma, the protagonist, prepares a meager dinner of rice and eggs, one of the final meals her family will eat in a famine-ridden, near-future Kolkata. The city is in the grips of climate disaster. Markets once full of “slow shoppers inspecting the purple shine of eggplant and pressing guavas hard as hail” now have “nothing but some onion peel scattered at the edges where the pavement gave way to earth.”

But Ma is about to escape this emptiness. Her husband, a scientist, is working in the United States and has secured “climate visas” for Ma; their 2-year-old daughter, Mishti; and Ma’s widowed father, Dadu, to join him in Michigan. In one week, the three of them will leave. “All Ma needed to do,” Majumdar writes, “was survive these seven days.” A statement as bald as this, at the start of any novel, is a warning. Read the full review at the New York Times.