Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Guardian And A Thief’ Explores Family, Fear, Climate Collapse

India-West Staff Reporter

NEW YORK, NY – Megha Majumdar, the acclaimed author of ‘A Burning’, returns this fall with her second novel, ‘A Guardian and a Thief’. Scheduled for release on October 14 by Knopf, the book marks a return to fiction for Majumdar, whose debut was a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award longlist title.

With ‘A Burning’, she was praised for her gripping portrayal of contemporary India. With ‘A Guardian and a Thief’, she steps into speculative territory, imagining a near-future Kolkata ravaged by climate collapse.

Set over the course of a single week, the novel unfolds in a city teetering on the edge—parched, crumbling, and desperate. Water is scarce, food scarcer, and the line between law and lawlessness has blurred beyond recognition. In this fragile world, Majumdar introduces two central characters: Ma, a mother scrambling to reclaim a stolen cache of food and vital immigration papers; and Boomba, the thief who took them in a bid to feed his own family. Their stories intersect not through confrontation but through the consequences of their choices, mirrored by a city caught in collective survival.

Majumdar, in characteristic form, writes with both urgency and empathy. Her gaze is unflinching as she confronts the moral ambiguity that arises in desperate times. “But the needs of others were always smaller than the needs of one’s own child,” one character reflects. “Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one’s own pain.” That line captures the philosophical weight of the book—how survival distorts values and fractures solidarity.

Born and raised in Kolkata, Majumdar brings an intimate understanding of the city to this speculative future. The climate crisis isn’t presented as distant or abstract. It is immediate and brutally real—collapsing infrastructure, the erosion of trust, the fragile economies of daily life. This grounded vision adds depth to a novel that is both thrilling in pace and haunting in implication.

A recipient of the 2022 Whiting Award, Majumdar holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and was formerly the editor-in-chief of Catapult books. She now lives in New York, but her literary gaze remains fixed on the complexities and contradictions of contemporary—and future—India.

The novel poses timely questions: How do people make moral choices when the world around them no longer upholds moral systems? What are we willing to do for those we love, and what are the costs?

Majumdar doesn’t offer easy answers, but she does what few writers do with such precision—she makes the personal feel political, and the political deeply personal.