{"id":208299,"date":"2025-10-18T07:05:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T07:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/208299\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T07:05:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T07:05:19","slug":"megha-majumdar-on-a-guardian-and-a-thief-oprahs-book-club-and-her-national-book-award-nomination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/208299\/","title":{"rendered":"Megha Majumdar on ‘A Guardian and a Thief,’ Oprah’s Book Club, and Her National Book Award Nomination"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three days ago, Megha Majumdar<\/a> perched on the edge of a tufted sofa and watched, still baffled, as Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King told the CBS Mornings<\/a> audience that neither of them had ever read a book quite like hers. <\/p>\n

Majumdar had known this announcement was coming, of course. But the experience of sitting beside Winfrey and King on live television, both of them elated over her sophomore novel, A Guardian and a Thief<\/a>, nevertheless felt surreal\u2014as if she\u2019d been pulled \u201coutside the context of my life.\u201d That morning, A Guardian and a Thief became Winfrey\u2019s 119th Oprah\u2019s Book Club<\/a> pick, all but guaranteeing a threshold of success for the work of speculative literary fiction. Only a week prior, Majumdar had received news that her novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction<\/a>. Before that, in August, she learned it was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize<\/a>. <\/p>\n

When Majumdar and I meet in early October at Sarabeth\u2019s Central Park South, Winfrey has yet to make her announcement, but Majumdar is already the subject of passionate chatter on the literary circuit. The author acknowledges this buzz with a sort of thoughtful, practical humility. She is effusive in her gratitude, and she can\u2019t deny the work she\u2019s put in to reach this juncture. (It does, after all, take an author of a certain caliber to make the National Book Award longlist not once but twice in a row, first with her 2020 debut novel, A Burning<\/a>, and now for A Guardian and a Thief.) But Majumdar is also all too aware of the role, she says, her \u201cluck\u201d has played. <\/p>\n

Over hot chocolate and quiche, she spends the next two hours reinforcing for me why her book\u2014which explores how luck, or the lack thereof, can cleave the world in two\u2014is among the best of the year. A Guardian and a Thief takes place over seven days, tracing the parallel lives of the titular guardian and thief in a near-future, climate-ravaged Kolkata, India, where Majumdar herself was born and raised. The guardian, identified only as Ma, seeks asylum for her father and daughter in America. (They\u2019ve been granted \u201cclimate visas\u201d thanks to her husband\u2019s work as a scientist in Michigan.) The thief, meanwhile, is a young man named Boomba, who swipes these visas whilst trying to ransack the food stockpiles in Ma\u2019s modest home. Having relocated to Kolkata from his family\u2019s rural village, he is desperate to secure a place to live for his mother, father, and younger brother, as their home has nearly collapsed amidst famine and flood. As he looks upon buildings such as Ma\u2019s house\u2014buildings that still provide shelter, itself a luxury\u2014Majumdar writes, \u201cDidn\u2019t Boomba\u2019s family deserve the smallest part of such a life, which was to say, a home that allowed neither mosquito nor rainwater nor robber to assault them?\u201d<\/p>\n

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar<\/p>\n

\"<i>A<\/a><\/p>\n

This question of who \u201cdeserves\u201d a life of safety, let alone one of comfort, looms over both Ma and Boomba as their respective roles\u2014guardian and thief\u2014blur and swap. They find themselves confronted with moral decisions they cannot pause to consider fully, lest the hesitation punish them or their loved ones. When a beggar approaches Ma, she chooses not to acknowledge him but to save her resources for her daughter, Mishti and the child\u2019s \u201csafe passage\u201d to America. (\u201cMa looked away from the beggar, toward Mishti, more human than the human before her,\u201d Majumdar writes.) Elsewhere, Boomba confronts a similar quandary when he kidnaps Mishti to use her as leverage before a billionaire\u2019s charity. \u201cBoomba was no monster,\u201d Majumdar posits. \u201cAll Boomba was, was a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family.\u201d <\/p>\n

At Sarabeth\u2019s, Majumdar sets down her fork and considers the dissonance of selfless versus selfish love. Is a purely selfless love even possible? \u201cYour hope for yourself and your own family\u2026what do you do when that is not aligned with the hope of the collective?\u201d she asks. \u201cWhat do you do when those hopes begin to splinter and what is good for you is not good for your neighbor?\u201d Reading about the effects of climate change in her research for A Guardian and a Thief, she came across numerous \u201cdeclarations of hope.\u201d But she felt they failed to capture the fullness of how such hope might materialize once under the threat of catastrophe: how messy, brutal, and even cruel it can appear.<\/p>\n

\"megha<\/p>\n

MARCO GIUGLIARELLI<\/p>\n

\u201cThe questions of the book are questions that we deal with every day, just on a much milder level,\u201d she continues. Like Ma and Boomba, \u201cwe\u2019re all making ethical choices about what to buy and what to eat.\u201d Also like these characters, we know that \u201clong chains of labor and exploitation and poor work conditions\u201d enable us to purchase the fruits and vegetables and meats we rely upon. The book then explores how those ethical decisions morph when systems collapse, when environments of \u201cextreme pressure\u201d limit our choices even further. The reality of climate change \u201cis approaching,\u201d the author says. \u201cThis book is a glimpse at who we might be\u2014with our love, our wounds and sorrows and aspirations\u2014in that situation.\u201d <\/p>\n

As such, it is a book that understands the nature of luck: that some will receive chances others do not, and those chances might have everything or nothing to do with our \u201cdeserving\u201d of them. Majumdar\u2019s comprehension of this reality shapes her own attitude toward success. When asked about the accolades A Guardian and a Thief has already received, she offers a warm smile and replies, \u201cI\u2019m so proud of the work I\u2019ve done on the book, and so grateful for the publishing team who worked on it. And also\u2014without diminishing any of that work\u2014I feel it\u2019s also a matter of luck. There are so many good books, and so many of them are published very quietly.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYour hope for yourself and your own family\u2026what do you do when that is not aligned with the hope of the collective?\u201d<\/p>\n

Majumdar would know: She\u2019s been on both sides of the publishing equation. For seven years, she worked at the publisher Catapult Books<\/a>, first as an editorial assistant and ultimately as editor-in-chief, a role she left in 2022 to focus full-time on writing after receiving a Whiting Award grant<\/a> in April of that year. \u201cIt was such a tough decision\u201d to leave Catapult, she says. \u201cI always thought that I\u2019m a person who needs to have a 9-to-5. The stability of a job felt really foundational to any kind of life for me.\u201d At the time, she was in the middle of writing the manuscript that would become A Guardian and a Thief, and she was struggling to make the narrative work. \u201cIt felt like it was my moment to see what I could do with the book if I gave it my whole mind and my whole energy,\u201d she says. For the first time in her life, she devoted her days to her own writing.<\/p>\n

\"megha<\/p>\n

MARCO GIUGLIARELLI<\/p>\n

Even now, at 38, Majumdar says it\u2019s a wonder to write in English, given that she spent much of her childhood \u201cafraid of the English language.\u201d The author grew up speaking Bengali but was taught English in school, and at 19 she moved to the U.S. from Kolkata to study social anthropology at Harvard University. \u201cI applied to American colleges because I really wanted to learn how to think of myself, and I felt like I wasn\u2019t getting that in India,\u201d she says. \u201cThe school system in India was, at least at that time, very oriented toward exams. I really didn\u2019t know how to question a text or form an opinion or articulate my thoughts in response to reading something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvard provided her with the tools she sought, but they came at the cost of severing herself from her family, her homeland, and a language\u2014both literal and figurative\u2014she could fully comprehend. \u201cI felt so lost in the American cultural milieu,\u201d she says of those early years in Massachusetts. Her roommates had her watch Donnie Darko and listen to Sufjan Stevens as entry points, but no amount of mid-aughts American media could eclipse the loneliness she encountered. \u201cI feel like so many people at Harvard knew how to make friends in a networking way,\u201d she says. \u201cMy understanding of friendship was, well, if you like someone and you like talking to them, then you hang out with them. I didn\u2019t really understand [the relevance] of, what is their background? Will they be of possible benefit to me in the future? Are we going to be in the same social circle? I had a very innocent approach to making friends, and so I was often very lonely.\u201d In contrast, her classes were a beacon. She was at last \u201cinvigorated\u201d as she studied African politics and South American history and Russian affairs. \u201cI felt, \u2018Okay, so I\u2019m finally learning how to think.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes a lot of courage to face who we truly are, and who we truly can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

After living in New York, China, and Baltimore\u2014where she earned a master\u2019s degree at Johns Hopkins University\u2014Majumdar returned to New York City and eventually landed her first role at Catapult just as the press launched its first slate of books in 2015. <\/p>\n

A decade later, the author and her family are still based in New York. In 2021, she gave birth to her first son, and in August of this year, she delivered another son. Motherhood, she says, \u201chelped me find the emotional center\u201d of her second novel. It also forced her to ask questions of herself\u2014and, by extension, her characters\u2014that might not otherwise prove pressing. What might her love look like when placed under pressure? Who might she become if, as in the case of Ma and Booma, she had to choose between the well-being of her children and that of her community? Is it ever really possible to extricate one from the other?<\/p>\n

\"megha<\/p>\n

MARCO GIUGLIARELLI<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes a lot of courage to face who we truly are, and who we truly can be,\u201d Majumdar tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s very emotionally unsettling to face that we could contain something of a thief within us.\u201d<\/p>\n

She concludes, \u201cArt helps us get away from the questions that otherwise dominate our lives, like matters of logistics: \u2018What is our day going to look like? What do we have to do for our jobs?\u2019 It tunnels into a region of questions that are bigger, that perhaps at some point in our lives will become the more pressing questions: \u2018Why am I here? When I look back on my life, what do I long to have accomplished? What kind of life do I really want to live?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

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