A story set in Calcutta is in the running for the US National Book Award, one of America’s top literary prizes. Megha Majumdar's The Guardian and a Thief is one of five works of fiction shortlisted for the prize that will be given out at a glittering ceremony next month.
Previous National Book Award fiction winners include literary giants like Saul Bellow. Jhumpa Lahiri was a finalist for the award in 2013.
Majumdar’s debut novel, The Burning, was also set in Calcutta and was longlisted in 2020 for the National Book Award. If she does win with The Guardian and a Thief, she will be the first Indian-origin person to take home the award.
However, Majumdar has already received recognition that could be even more lucrative than the National Book Award. The Oprah Book Club, run by American talk show hostess and celebrity Oprah Winfrey, has declared The Guardian and a Thief to be one of the outstanding works of fiction of 2025, saying she was “spellbound from page one.”
Megha Majumdar and Oprah Winfrey. (Instagram)
Oprah Book Club recommendations are worth their weight in gold. Author and physician Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water was recommended by the book club in May 2023 and has since sold over two million copies.
Set in a near-future dystopian Calcutta crippled by climate change and famine, The Guardian and a Thief follows lives caught between privilege and survival, as a stolen purse sets off a chain of events over seven gripping days.
The Oprah magic wand is almost certain to cement Majumdar as one of Calcutta’s newest compelling literary voices.
The Guardian and a Thief was also a finalist for the respected Kirkus Prize, alongside Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a tender portrait of a couple torn between continents and expectations.
Oprah has been unrestrained in her praise for Majumdar’s novel. “Megha Majumdar is one of those exquisitely skilled authors who takes us into the story of characters and cultural conflicts and leaves us spellbound until the last word and beyond. Who was the ‘Guardian’ and who was the ‘Thief’? I’m still thinking about it.”
Oprah Winfrey holding Megha Majumdar's ‘The Guardian and a Thief’. (oprahdaily.com)
Majumdar, 38, described the experience of hearing Oprah Winfrey praise her book as “outside the context of my life.”
Calcutta plays a starring role in the novel, as it does in many others. Climate change has transformed the city into a grim, famine-ridden and frequently flooded megalopolis. Majumdar’s speciality is contrasting the lives of the affluent and the poverty-stricken.
In this book, the wealthy are represented by Ma and her family, who are about to emigrate to Michigan, where her husband has landed a job as a scientist. Ma is determined to secure a safe future for her daughter and father. They have received what are called “climate visas” and are due to leave in seven days. The poor are represented by Boomba, a young man living in a shelter managed by Ma, who is dazzled by the opulence of rich households after leaving his village.
Book cover of ‘The Guardian and a Thief’. (Instagram)
Boomba, the young thief, steals the purse containing the life-saving visas while scavenging for food in Ma’s home. Having recently left his collapsing rural village, he is determined to protect his family, even as Calcutta’s inequities confront him at every turn. “Didn’t Boomba’s 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?” Majumdar writes.
Majumdar was brought up in Calcutta and moved to the US at 19 to study social anthropology at Harvard, followed by a master’s at Johns Hopkins. She grew up speaking Bengali and describes herself modestly: “I was once a girl in India who struggled to learn the English language. I could not have imagined this turn in my life.”
The author's first novel, The Burning, set in contemporary Calcutta and examining the aftermath of a terrorist attack, established her as an important new literary figure when it became a New York Times bestseller in 2020.
She said she applied to US colleges “because I really wanted to learn how to think for myself and I felt like I wasn’t getting that in India,” telling Elle magazine that the school system was “very oriented towards exams. I really didn’t know how to question a text or form an opinion.”
Adjusting to US life was tough. “I felt so lost in the American cultural milieu,” she says, but adds that she felt “invigorated” by her classes. Set in Calcutta, her first book explores the effects of a terrorist attack on three individuals.
After her studies, Majumdar worked for seven years at the New York publishing house Catapult, becoming editor-in-chief in 2021. She left a year later and now divides her time between writing and teaching, splitting her life between New York and Calcutta. She spent six years crafting her latest novel. She now has two children and says that being a mother “helped me find the emotional centre” of her second novel.
“The reality of climate change is approaching,” Majumdar told Elle. “This book is a glimpse at who we might be – with our love, our wounds and sorrows and aspirations – in that situation.”
Calcutta is a character in itself in Majumdar’s work. Known as the City of Joy, it has long been a literary muse, serving as the setting for Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy and other notable novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
Majumdar contrasts the city’s poverty with the opulence of America, where Ma and her family will move. “It was a country of grocery stores as large as aircraft hangars, stocked with waxed fruit and misted vegetables and canned legumes from floor to ceiling,” unlike famine-hit Calcutta, where guavas were “hard as hail.”
Majumdar has emerged as one of Calcutta’s newest literary stars. In an age when climate change and inequality are reshaping the world, she is showing herself to be a writer attuned to the moral, social and emotional complexities of the challenges ahead.