Love and Theft in a Drowning City

Postcards of India by Paper Jewels, 1899 | Kosmos, Budapest / CC BY-NC 4.0

A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), the new novel by Megha Majumdar, unfolds over a single week in a not-so-distant future. Kolkata has been devastated by flooding and famine; Ma, a middle-class shelter manager, is preparing to flee the city with her father and two-year-old daughter to join her husband in Michigan. But then the family’s climate visas are stolen the night before departure. The thief is Boomba, a young man from the shelter she once ran, who breaks into her home with the hope of feeding his own family. From this premise, Majumdar constructs a tense moral parable for the twenty-first century that awaits us: Two families, each driven by the same ferocious instinct to protect a child, collide in a city where scarcity is rapidly eroding the social contract.     

Majumdar first drew international acclaim with her 2020 debut, A Burning (Knopf, 2020), a taut, polyphonic portrait of modern India that was longlisted for the National Book Award and became a New York Times bestseller. Born and raised in Kolkata and educated at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, she brings to her fiction both an insider’s intimacy and a diasporic distance. A Guardian and a Thief, longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, deepens her exploration of injustice and moral compromise under systems of power.

The novel’s speculative frame is minimal. The “climate visas,” the collapsed food networks, the underground markets of algae and synthetic fish all feel like extensions of the current news cycle rather than science fiction. What gives Majumdar’s choice of a near-future setting force is the matter-of-fact way catastrophe has become ordinary. Residents queue for “climate visas” as if for routine paperwork, and Ma’s daughter grows up believing power outages, synthetic fish, and water boiled by the sun are simply normal features of city life. The apocalypse, in Majumdar’s world, arrives not with spectacle but with changes in government paperwork and individuals’ everyday errands and habits.

The novel alternates between Ma’s and Boomba’s perspectives, and Majumdar resists simplifying either. Ma is no saint: he has been quietly stealing food donations from the shelter to feed her family. The escape route to which she clings to is emblematic of the kind of class privilege most of her compatriots will never enjoy. Boomba, on the other hand, is a boy whose worldview is informed by a lifetime of deprivation: As Boomba puts it, “take what you want, or others will take it.” 

Majumdar draws connections between colonial famine, contemporary inequality, and climate migration, suggesting that today’s disasters are continuations of older violences. When Ma recalls the Bengal famines of 1770 and 1943, Majumdar underscores that the future is haunted by history’s repetition. What makes A Guardian and a Thief so gripping is the way Majumdar folds this political critique into intimate scenes. A bus strike, a heat-stroke death, a market riot all become backdrops for small domestic gestures: Ma wetting a cloth for her child’s neck, Boomba pocketing a broken toy for his brother. These details accumulate into a vision of humanity persisting under impossible conditions.  

If A Burning was a novel of speed—its plot racing along social media outrage and political opportunism—A Guardian and a Thief is slower, heavier, more elemental. Its warning lies in its stillness: the waiting lines at the consulate, the long night walks through a city where “the roads where markets usually sat were completely empty.” The suspense arises less from whether Ma will recover her purse than from the moral question the book keeps turning over: How much wrongdoing can love excuse?

There is, too, a quiet satire running through the book. Majumdar skewers the global North’s self-congratulatory humanitarianism—its “climate visas” and research grants that turn apocalypse into opportunity. Ma’s husband, a scientist studying mosquito-borne diseases in Ann Arbor, embodies the irony: The imbalance that makes his family desperate to escape the Global South is also the source of his income and the family’s passage to the United States. The families’ arcs occasionally feel too neatly counterbalanced, their tragedies preordained. But the book’s moral urgency never hardens into didacticism. Majumdar’s language—precise, compassionate, luminous—gives desperation texture: sticky air, salt water seeping into rice. A Guardian and a Thief turns ruin into the site of possibility. “In fetching him a plate,” Ma wonders of a stranger at her window, “who might she have become?” It’s the question that animates the book: Could care still reorder a collapsing world?