In one sentence: In a near-future Kolkata starving through climate collapse, a mother’s stolen passports set off a seven-day collision between her family and the young thief who took them, in a novel that asks whether there is any moral difference between a guardian and a thief when both are just trying to feed the people they love.
At a Glance
Author: Megha Majumdar
First published: 2025 by Alfred A. Knopf in the US and Scribner in the UK
Category: Fiction, literary and speculative
Length: about 224 pages, roughly 60,000 words
ISBN-13: 978-0-593-80487-2 (Knopf hardcover, Oprah’s Book Club edition; our source copy was the Scribner UK edition 978-1-3985-5562-4)
Summary reading time: about 11 minutes
Book reading time: about 4 hours
Honours: finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025
Kolkata, the near future. The heat kills taxi drivers at the wheel, sparrows fall dead from the sky, the paddies are poisoned with salt, and a food shortage is sliding into famine while state TV calls it a hoax. Ma has seven days before she escapes it all: her husband, six months into a research job in Michigan, has secured plane tickets and precious climate visas for her, their two-year-old daughter Mishti, and her elderly father Dadu. Then, on night one, a hungry young man named Boomba climbs through the kitchen window, empties the family’s hidden food store, and steals the purse holding all three passports, which he cannot read and throws onto a garbage heap. The novel counts down the six days that remain, day by day, as two desperate families converge on one house.
Read this book if you want the rare climate novel that works as a thriller, a moral X-ray, and a portrait of a city all at once. It is short, propulsive, often very funny, and it earns its devastation honestly. Readers of A Fine Balance will recognize the territory: ordinary people, an extraordinary vise.
Skip it if you need justice done by the last page. Majumdar refuses rescue, and the ending, discussed under a spoiler warning below, is one of the harshest in recent fiction. Readers wanting the climate crisis solved, or even survived, should look elsewhere.
The Big Idea
The title is the whole thesis. Every guardian in this novel is also a thief, and every thief is somebody’s guardian. Ma stole food and money from the refugee shelter she ran, to protect Mishti. Gentle Dadu, before the week is out, will steal an orange from a crying child and fight a stranger for two cauliflowers. Boomba robs the family not from malice but to house his own mother, broken father, and small brother Robi. Majumdar’s wager is that scarcity does not create villains, it reveals that “a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family” is the most ordinary thing in the world, and that a society which forces everyone to choose between their own child and everyone else’s has already decided what its people will become.
The Story
Mild spoilers begin here. The final section is flagged for major spoilers.
Seven days to the flight (Days 1 to 4)
The novel opens on the eve of departure. Ma, her father Dadu, and little Mishti collect their passports and climate visas from the American consulate, cross a city of robotic police dogs, taxi strikes, and markets selling cricket flour and synthetic fish, and come home to pack. That night Boomba, a twenty-year-old shelter resident who watched Ma pilfer donated eggs and followed her home, climbs in through the kitchen window Ma left ajar. He empties the secret storeroom, sells the food within the hour to a line outside a community kitchen, keeps the purse for his mother, and, finding three navy booklets he cannot identify, tosses the passports onto a garbage heap and kicks trash over them.
The theft detonates the family’s escape plan. The police refuse to file a report (“We don’t file reports for these things anymore. We don’t have the manpower, or the womanpower”). Without a report, the consulate cannot reissue visas before September. The flight is in five days. What follows is a detective story run on neighborhood ties instead of institutions: a neighbor’s door camera, two-year-old Mishti recognizing the thief’s Scooby-Doo T-shirt on the footage, a shopkeeper who knows that shirt because it was stolen from his own clothesline, and a dropped handkerchief that leads Ma back to the shelter she once managed. She confronts Boomba, threatens police, and discovers her own theft makes her blackmailable. His price for the passports’ location: the house itself, signed over to his family. The garbage-heap search fails, and Ma descends into the city beneath the city, where a forger with a tricolor pen promises three perfect passports in 48 hours, payment in gold only. She hands over her dead mother’s bangles.
The hexagon (Day 5)
Boomba, now squatting in the family’s storeroom by blackmail, takes Mishti. Not for ransom: the city’s last billionaire, who lives on a fortified artificial island in the river called the hexagon, is throwing a pre-wedding charity feast for twenty thousand poor children and their guardians, and a lone man cannot get in. A man holding a child is a guardian. What follows is the novel’s great set piece. Boomba means to skim food into plastic bags but instead finds himself deboning fish for Mishti, peeling her lychees, patting her back when she coughs. Then his friend Shanto, the ferry pilot whose small son died of cerebral malaria because he could not afford the injections the hexagon’s clinics stockpile, leads a raid on the island’s pantries that becomes a mass looting. Guards fire, the overloaded ferry sinks meters from shore, and Boomba, in the water with a ten-kilogram sack of rice in one arm and Mishti in the other, lets the rice go. Shanto helps hundreds of children into rescue boats with an uncanny calm, then lets himself join his son. Boomba returns Mishti to her frantic mother, and Dadu, the gentlest soul in the book, beats him with his walking stick.
The last days (Days 6 and 7, major spoilers)
The beating costs more than anyone knows. Dadu, already injured from a fight over food he would not report, refuses a hospital, reasoning that scans and bills would force his daughter to choose between her father’s health and her flight. He dies in his sleep, given one of the most beautiful chapters in the book, a dying reverie that replays a whole Kolkata life until he is “no longer father, no longer husband, no longer son or grandfather, only a stranger on a bus in the city, his face to the window.” Ma cremates him alone, packs his ashes in a ziplock bag inside a tiffin box, and lies to her husband on the phone.
Day 7 delivers the novel’s cruelest reversals in sequence. The forged passports bleed ink and are worthless. Then the ironing man knocks: a ragpicker found the original passports on the garbage heap, water-stained but valid. Deliverance lasts exactly as long as the taxi ride to the airport, where the departures board announces that America, inflamed by news footage of the hexagon looting, has halted all flights for climate immigrants indefinitely, perhaps for years. And while the family stood in line, Boomba moved his mother, father, and brother into their house. When Ma returns and tries to reclaim it, Dadu’s secateur in hand, Boomba’s father strikes her with the stolen pressure cooker and kills her. The family drags her body behind the house and washes the blood into the earth. In the final scene Boomba crosses to the neighbor’s garden, where Mishti waits with the parrots, and tells her that Mama said to come home. “The child looked a little perplexed, but calmly took his hand.” Her father, an ocean away, still believes his family is on the plane.
The Characters
Ma is the novel’s center and its thesis made flesh: a woman with a master’s degree in nonprofit administration who ran a shelter for flood refugees for a decade and stole from it for her daughter. Majumdar gives her full awareness of what she is (“mother to nobody but her own child, her love showing how mother was the opposite of motherly”) and lets neither her love nor her guilt cancel the other.
Boomba gets the book’s boldest structural gift, a chapter-length biography that rewinds the “thief” into a boy from a flooded village who wanted to be an explorer, raised his baby brother, accidentally burned down the family house, and was robbed by the city three times before he robbed anyone. He is a kidnapper who saves the child he kidnapped, and the novel’s final guardian.
Dadu is the heart: a retired distribution manager for a pruning-shears company, an amateur poet who believes the city’s street-corner philosophers will save it, and the proof of how far scarcity reaches, because even he ends the week stealing fruit from a five-year-old and reflecting that “he now lived in a world in which old men stole fruit from children. He had brought into being such a world.”
Mishti, age two, supplies the book’s comedy (“flowerflower” for cauliflower, “Goosebutts” for goosebumps) and its stakes. Every adult crime in the novel is committed for a child like her, a symmetry the ending weaponizes.
Shanto, the ferry pilot, carries the novel’s political rage, and Baba, the father in Michigan, carries its diaspora grief, given a single lyric chapter on immigrant loneliness that concludes “the pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound.”
The Themes
The guardian and the thief are the same person
The novel’s structure is a hall of mirrors. Boomba’s break-in through the kitchen window is answered two days later by Dadu breaking into a stranger’s hoard for cauliflowers. Ma’s threat to call the police is neutralized by Boomba’s identical knowledge of her theft. Even the entry rule at the hexagon literalizes the title: a man alone is a suspect, a man holding a child is a guardian. Nobody in the book is only one thing.
Scarcity is a moral solvent, and love is its accelerant
Majumdar’s most unsettling claim is that it is love, not selfishness, that does the damage. “The pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one’s own pain,” the narrator observes, and every crossed line in the novel is crossed for a beloved. The book never lets the reader stand outside this logic, because each character’s reasoning, taken alone, is airtight.
Documents rule until they don’t
The first half is tyrannized by paper: passports, visas, police reports, ration fingerprints. The second half watches paper’s authority dissolve into force and performance, as Boomba reflects that “the days of obeying documents were gone. New codes of savage behavior, or old codes, newly revealed, were taking their place.” The airport scene completes the argument: even valid documents are worthless when politics changes its mind.
Hope as a predator
Against the softness the word usually carries, Ma’s hope is “no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature… It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.” Hope is what makes her pay a forger in heirloom gold, barricade windows with teacups as alarms, and lie to her husband to his last question. The novel honors hope’s necessity while charging it full price.
The city as character and casualty
Between plot beats the book is a love letter to a Kolkata that is dying: street philosophers, parrots named Abba and Bee Gees, a rickshaw driver hawking himself as a “discount Uber,” a flavor-spray seller for empty stomachs, guards reading Asterix comics. Dadu’s belief that a city is its “relationships of dependence” is vindicated in the plot itself, since every break the family gets comes from a neighbor, never an institution.
Context and Analysis
Majumdar arrived with A Burning in 2020, a debut about one Facebook post destroying a young woman’s life, and this second novel took her six years. Born and raised in Kolkata before moving to the US at nineteen, she has said the book grew from watching the climate news from the city of her childhood and from becoming a parent herself, and the double vision shows: the Kolkata material has an insider’s affection, and the Michigan chapter an emigrant’s ache. The book was published by Knopf in 2025 to the kind of reception second novels rarely get: a National Book Award Fiction finalist slot, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and a place on Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025. The National Book Award judges called it “a profound examination of the lengths to which we will go to protect our loved ones.”
Critically, the novel sits in the growing territory of climate fiction that trades planetary spectacle for household scale, closer to the domestic dread of a famine chronicle than to disaster epic. The honest criticisms: some reviewers found the machinery visible, with the New York Times noting it “occasionally gets didactic, and its ending is simply too eventful to have much impact,” and it is true that Day 7 stacks reversals (forgery failed, passports returned, flights canceled, house seized, Ma killed) with an almost cruel efficiency. Defenders answer that the pile-up is the point, since for the poor of this world catastrophe never arrives one polite blow at a time. For readers of this site, the closest companion is our summary of A Fine Balance, which performs the same operation on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency that Majumdar performs on the climate crisis: a small household built with love, then broken by forces it cannot vote out. Both novels also share the conviction, familiar from our summary of 1984, that the state’s failures land hardest on those least able to absorb them, though Majumdar’s Kolkata needs no Ministry of Love, only heat, hunger, and a closed border.
Themes in Life
The novel is fiction, but its questions are not, and they travel well beyond the climate frame.
The circle of care question. Every character draws a circle around the people they will protect and treats everyone outside it as negotiable. The book invites an honest audit: where is your circle’s edge, and what do you already excuse in its name?
Institutions versus relationships. When the police, consulate, and ration system all fail, the family survives on neighbors, shopkeepers, and a rickshaw driver who remembers them. Worth asking which of the two webs your own life actually hangs on, and which one you invest in.
The lie of the smooth update. Ma’s phone calls to Michigan, cheerful and false to the end, dramatize how families under strain manage each other’s fear across distance. The novel is unusually wise about protective lying, its kindness and its cost.
Migration as wound and pride. Baba’s chapter distills the emigrant bargain into one line about pride and wound, a sentence worth sitting with for anyone who has left one life to build another.
Reading the era’s weather. The novel’s Kolkata is an extrapolation, but every element (heat deaths, crop failure, water rationing, climate visas, anti-migrant backlash) extends a headline that already exists. It works as an empathy rehearsal for choices that are coming.
Memorable Lines
“It was a beautiful lie, and it resonated in them like the truth.”
“The heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.”
“Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.”
“Few knew that, on this day, Shanto was traveling to the country where his son was.”
“The pride of having immigrated was also, in truth, the wound.”
“The child looked a little perplexed, but calmly took his hand.”
Should You Read the Full Book?
Verdict: Essential. (Our scale: Essential, Recommended, or Summary is enough.)
Yes, and in one or two sittings if you can. At barely 220 pages this is the shortest Essential on our shelf, and its force is inseparable from its compression: the day-by-day countdown, the alternating perspectives that force you to root for both the family and their robber, and Dadu’s dying reverie, which no summary can do anything but flatten. The ending lands the way it does only if you have spent the whole week inside these people. Knowing the plot, as you now do, dulls surprise but not impact, because the book’s power was never in what happens, it is in being made to agree, step by step, with people doing unforgivable things.
The summary may be enough if you are reading for the climate-fiction landscape rather than the experience, or if this is a season when you cannot afford a book that ends where this one does. The content notes are real: child endangerment, a parent’s death, and an unpunished murder. But if you can bear it, this is one of the books of 2025, and four hours is a small price.
Oprah Winfrey recommends A Guardian and a Thief. The quote, and the source it came from, are on the book page.