A guardian and a thief

Majumdar (A Burning) spins a luminous story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in near-future Kolkata. It revolves around a mother known only as Ma, who manages a shelter between caring for her aging father and two-year-old daughter, Mishti. The three of them have obtained highly coveted "climate visas" and are preparing to join Mishti's father in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he's spent the past six months working as a medical researcher. All is hopeful until the household is visited by a young thief named Boomba, who followed Ma home from the shelter suspecting (correctly) that she is siphoning food from her workplace. The plot thickens when Boomba makes off with the family's passports, causing further complications for all involved. Majumdar conjures a city at once deteriorating and resilient, where markets sell seaweed and synthetic fish, and the city's "remaining benevolent billionaire" lives on a heavily guarded man-made island in a widening river. As Ma and her family struggle to reclaim the passports, Majumdar unspools Boomba's backstory, crafting a complex antagonist who gradually gains the reader's sympathy. There's no clear-cut villain here, just people attempting to survive and protect their own. This proves once again that Majumdar is a master of the moral dilemma. Eric Simonoff, WME. (Oct.)

In near-future Kolkata, the fates of two families become disastrously intertwined. With gorgeous writing and the pacing of a thriller, Majumdar's second novel--afterA Burning (2020)--transports the reader to a world ravaged by drought, burning heat, and severe food scarcity. As the story begins, it's Day 1 of the week before Ma will take her 2-year-old daughter, Mishti, and her father, Dadu, to join her scientist husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on laboriously procured climate visas, which she regards as "treasure beyond her greatest hope." Ma just left her job managing a shelter, an organization supported by the single remaining local billionaire, whose food donations she has been lightly skimming to keep her family fed. A teenage resident of the shelter, Boomba, devises a desperate plan to follow Ma home and recapture some of the booty for resale on the street, as he's frantic to raise money to rescue his own parents and beloved younger sibling, languishing in dire straits outside the city. Among the items he grabs are Ma's purse, containing the three passports, setting in motion a series of escalating catastrophes, crimes, and ironies, each darker than the last, all of it concealed by both Ma and Boomba in their hopeful phone conversations with husband and parents, respectively. Fully inhabiting both characters over the ensuing seven days, Majumdar reveals her unsettling message: A guardian and a thief lives in each of us. Her evocation of the lost world that lives in the characters' memories makes the situation not just terrifying but almost criminally poignant, and the way she manages to connect all the storylines with a resolution that unfolds both globally and in one small living room is genius. This electrifying depiction of dignity and morality under siege reveals the horror hidden by the bland term "climate change." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.