Behind the Beautiful Forevers

A landmark debut from a Pulitzer-winning New Yorker journalist: if Dickens were alive today, this is the book he might have written about India

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'A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty' Salman Rushdie

'If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The Wire, this would be it' Barbara Ehrenreich

Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India's booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal.

As Boo gets to know those who dwell in Mumbai's margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.

'A triumph of a book. A beautiful account of the sorrows and joys, anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India' Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics

'Magnificent...a masterpiece... Quite simply, one of the finest works on contemporary India yet written' Sunday Telegraph