Megha Majumdar’s New Novel Is Named National Book Award Finalist

Photo: @megha.maj.

India-West Staff Reporter

NEW YORK, NY — Megha Majumdar, the Kolkata-born author whose debut A Burning electrified readers around the world, is back with a haunting new work — and it’s already garnering major acclaim. Her second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, to be published by Knopf on October 14, has been named a finalist for the National Book Award.

It was earlier shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction.

The novel unfolds over the course of one week in a near-future Kolkata battered by climate change — a city where floods, famine, and desperation have redrawn the map of survival. At its heart are two families, bound by loss and love: Ma, a mother on the verge of escaping to America with her young daughter and elderly father; and Boomba, the thief whose desperate act one night sets their lives on a collision course.

Early readers are calling it a masterpiece of vision and feeling. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff praised the novel’s power, writing: ‘Wondering if there’s a novel out there that gives Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a run for its money? Here you go. A Guardian and a Thief is an indelible piece of writing, in equal parts dazzling and devastating.’

For Majumdar, the book grew out of deep personal and environmental reflection. Kolkata, her hometown, has seen the sharpest rise in average temperature among major cities since 1950. ‘I remember days when my shoes would stick to the melting tar on the road because of the heat,’ she has said. ‘I wanted to imagine what that experience might feel like 10, 15, 20 years from now.’

The novel took six years to complete — a period during which Majumdar became a mother herself. That transformation, she says, shaped the book’s emotional core. ‘I was thinking about how love, especially a parent’s love, can become distorted or fanged in times of crisis,’ she reflected in a recent note.

Majumdar’s debut, A Burning, was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for multiple major literary awards. With her new novel, she deepens her exploration of justice, survival, and the fragile forces that bind people together even as the world burns around them.

Knopf will publish A Guardian and a Thief on October 14.