A Guardian and a Thief (2025)
Why this one?
I requested this on NetGalley a little while back on the basis of an interesting plot description and some heavyweight recommendations. It then popped up on this year’s National Book Award shortlist, which prompted me to push it up my reading order. I’m glad I did!
Megha Majumdar (1988- ; active 2020-) was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States for university, studying social anthropology at Harvard and subsequently completing graduate work at Johns Hopkins University. Before focusing on her writing career, she worked in publishing, holding editorial roles at Catapult in New York City, where she continues to live.
Her first novel, A Burning (2020), achieved significant success, becoming a New York Times bestseller. The book received widespread critical recognition, including a National Book Award for Fiction longlisting. She won a Whiting Award in 2022, and has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden foundations.
A Guardian and a Thief is out now in the US and will be published by Scribner in the UK in early 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
A Guardian and a Thief introduces us to two families in a near-future version of Kolkata. This is a world ravaged by the effects of the climate crisis, with unbearable heat and extreme food shortages a daily (and worsening) fact of life, with Kolkata clearly very much at the frontline of a global crisis. We first meet Ma, her toddler daughter Mishti and elderly father Dadu. The three are a week away from a move to Michigan in the US, where they will join Ma’s husband where he has a job as a scientist. Early in the novel, however, their house is broken into and (amongst more trivial items) their passports and travel documents are stolen. The remainder of the novel is structured around the next seven days, in which they frantically attempt to ensure that they are able to proceed with their planned journey.
We also get to know the character initially presented as the ‘thief’. A young man who is living in the shelter where Ma volunteers, we learn that Boomba has come to the city from rural poverty, in an attempt to provide for his own family and especially his owner toddler brother Robi, to whom he is a kind of father figure but has recently let down. His burglary of Ma’s household is not malicious, but presented as part of an inevitable attempt at survival and his own desire to be a ‘guardian’ to Robi (much as Ma is to her daughter) - he discards the travel documents without a thought as they are ‘not food or money’ - the only conceivable priorities in this collapsing society.
While the book is ostensibly a dystopia, it’s one that feels alarmingly close to home. The desperate scenario in which the Kolkata families find themselves is clearly not remotely fantastical, but rather representative of a reality that already exists for many around the world - that of the devastating destruction wrought by our rapidly changing climate and the subsequent nightmare of bureaucracy and borders that is presented to anyone trying to escape these horrors. Putting a key character in the US is a particularly clever move on the part of the book - here too, things are clearly rapidly deteriorating, but not yet as far advanced as the events in India, and comprehension of what is actually going on in the countries more immediately and severely impacted by the crisis is minimal (even for a family member).
In the midst of this disturbingly believable setup we find a couple of relatively ordinary families - one relatively comfortable and able to contemplate ‘escape’, and one more used to poverty and merely adapting already-existing strategies of survival to a reality that is worsening (but has always been somewhat miserable). Making things more heartbreakingly real are the young children in the story, notably Mishti (whose desperate pleas for her beloved cauliflower - ‘flowerflower’ in her toddlerspeak - in a world increasingly bereft of fresh produce of any kind - are especially crushing). Elsewhere the children in the book are universally well-drawn to the point of being ‘too real’ for this particular toddler dad. While his parents are being told that Boomba’s plan for them to move to a safer house in the city have fallen through, Robi is in the background cheerfully parroting that he will bring ‘one toy for me, one for Dada’; elsewhere - a five year old child has a precious orange stolen while his mother left him alone to go to the loo. Painful stuff!
In stark contrast to our main characters’ everyday struggle for survival, there’s also a supposedly benevolent billionaire leader who isolates herself on a remote complex (the ‘hexagon’) and offers crumbs of comfort to her rapidly starving population. We don’t see too much of her, I guess deliberately, pointing to the fact that she is purposefully cut off from the reality, and the suggestion that she is able to use to media to manipulate an entirely different story from the one we are reading. By the end of the book, we’re reminded very clearly of the reality faced by many over the world who find themselves between a rock and a hard place in a world of ludicrously increasing wealth disparity - their leaders, and those abroad, continue to enrich and protect themselves while providing nothing in the way of hope for those at the bottom.
It’s an incredibly tough read, throughout, but never in the sense of being ‘dark’ or ‘depressing’. I mean, it is objectively both of those things, but it’s also oddly beautiful in its presentation of hope and of the lengths people will go to protect their loved ones. It’s difficulty is more in recognising the truth of its characters in the midst of the horrors - from the everyday realistic mannerisms of the children to the desperate actions of the adult characters. And it’s also in the other methods Majumbar uses to raise and then crush the reader’s sense of optimism throughout the novel. Some of its effects are also purposefully delayed - the father in the US is repeatedly sheltered from the bleakest truths of Ma and his family’s situation, and we know that at the end of the book he has a massive payload of grim news to catch up with. Similarly, we are left pondering how the surviving characters in India will cope, not just with the worsening environmental crisis, but with the reality of what they’ve each been through.
I feel like I’ve already overused words like ‘crushing’, ‘devastating’ and ‘heartbreaking’ in this short summary, and it’s hard to use any other terminology to describe the impact this book will likely have on its readers. It’s written, though, with the pace of a thriller, with incredible heart and with the urgency of bringing this imminent (and indeed, for many, present) reality to life in a way that is both compelling and incredibly moving.
Score
9
Overall, a prescient and necessary read that manages to captivate and enthral at the same time as it utterly destroys you.
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Next up
One more Booker shortlister to read, in the shape of Flashlight.
