A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF, FINALIST FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF
MEGHA MAJUMDAR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

One of Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025!

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: FINALIST FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD (Winner announced 19 November 2025) • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times bestseller A Burning—longlisted for the National Book Award—is a piercing and propulsive tour de force.

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.

Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.

A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: No better way to explain the world to itself exists than the telling of stories. We do not all create for ourselves stories of consequences and of forces that exact consequences absent any input from ourselves. It's why we have writers, they do this heavy lifting for us.

Author Majumdar does the lifting with a careful design and a powerful effort. Boomba, Ma, Dadu, and Mishti are all very much people in my story-eye. I know why Boomba did what he did; I know why Ma does what she does; I am in each place seeing each reality, feeling the desperation in each action.

Choosing the best of your very bad options is an evergreen storytelling plot. Being a guardian, a thief, a human, is always a moving spot on a spectrum, and highly dependent on the point of view of the observer. Nothing in life is fixed, or at least not for very long; Boomba exemplifies the observer-makes-the-interpretation paradox. No one in this story is going to end up happy. "HappiER" is even a stretch. Yet they all strive, they all do something, no matter how weird to our twice-removed eyes.

It can never, ever be more obvious that the drive to live, the will to go on because on is the only way to go, is the proper material of storytelling. We are creatures of story who require heartening to go on, even though it is the only way To Go. Hearten yourselves. Go on.

It was her duty, as a guardian, to put into action the beautiful ideal of hope. Ma thought harshly: This was what it looked like. Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present. Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived. On this day, hope lived in the delivery of gold to a man who might be a scammer, and, perhaps, hope lived also in opening the doors to a thief.