Title: A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
Book Beginnings/First Line Friday quote:
From the storeroom hidden under the stairs, Ma fetched a cup of rice and a sack of eggs speckled grey like the moon, then cooked standing before the stove's blue flame, her eye upon the window and its dusk, in which bats swooped and the neem tree shivered and a figure down on the road pedaled a bicycle, whistling, as if everything was all right.
Friday56 quote (from page 22):
He spoke in the melodic way he did with Mishti, the act of communicating in words with her, as she acquired language, its own enchantment. But as she cried for cauliflower, somewhere inside him, from a deep slumber, rose what he knew about shortages past. The word he feared was famine.
Summary:
In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.
Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe. (Publisher)
Comment: I listened to the audiobook of A Guardian and a Thief. I had no idea until I looked around for quotes that the book is stuffed full of all these compound run-on sentences. Now I keep trying to imagine what my ninth grade English teacher would have said about them. Ha!
Review: A Guardian and a Thief came to my attention when it was named a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and was the winner of the Carnegie Medal for fiction in 2026. Just this week it was named to the 2026 longlist for the Women's Prize. Clearly the book has some literary chops, run-on sentences be damned.
The story is fairly depressing. A small family is trying to escape India because of the famine and rising temperatures. Just when they think they are on their way out, the papers that will allow their exit are stolen and so begins a frantic and desperate search for them and for a solution. I started listening to the book with my husband but due to unforeseen circumstances finished it by myself. The story is depressing but the ending is double depressing. When I summed up the book for Don, he quipped, "Well, I guess we can say that the moral of the book is there is not going to be a good ending for us concerning climate change." Gulp! All joking aside, he's right, I fear.
My rating: 3.75 stars.
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