Dazzling and Devastating: Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ Brings Climate Catastrophe Home to Kolkata

Megha Majumdar’s second novel, “A Guardian and a Thief,” has earned the Hunter College Distinguished Lecturer a finalist spot for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction—announced on November 19—alongside recognition as a Kirkus Prize finalist, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and a place on TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025. The acclaim represents a remarkable follow-up to her debut, “A Burning,” which was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2020.

Set in a near-future Kolkata ravaged by climate change, flooding, and famine, the 224-page novel has been described by The Washington Post as “a perfect short novel: 200 pages of tightly honed panic about life in a collapsing society.”

Two Families on a Collision Course

The novel unfolds over one harrowing week, telling the intertwined stories of two families whose fates become catastrophically linked. Ma, a shelter manager, her two-year-old daughter Mishti, and her elderly father Dadu are days away from escaping the collapsing city to join Ma’s scientist husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on precious climate visas. But when Ma awakens one morning to discover her purse—containing their irreplaceable immigration documents—has been stolen, their dreams of escape spiral into nightmare.

The thief is Boomba, a teenage resident of Ma’s own shelter, whose village was destroyed by floods and whose desperation to rescue his own parents and younger sibling drives him to commit the theft. Neither Ma nor Boomba can foresee the escalating consequences of this single act.

Publishers Weekly offered a starred review, noting: “Majumdar conjures a city at once deteriorating and resilient, where markets sell seaweed and synthetic fish, and the city’s ‘remaining benevolent billionaire’ lives on a heavily guarded man-made island in a widening river. There’s no clear-cut villain here, just people attempting to survive and protect their own. Majumdar proves once again that she is a master of the moral dilemma.”

Comparisons to McCarthy and Fairy Tales

The novel has drawn comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece “The Road.” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff wrote: “Wondering if there’s a novel out there that gives Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” a run for its money? Here you go. [A Guardian and a Thief is] an indelible piece of writing, in equal parts dazzling and devastating.”

In The New York Times Book Review, critic Lily Meyer praised Majumdar’s “tense and deeply compassionate portrait of desperation, fear and the combined selflessness and selfishness of parenthood.” Meyer acknowledged the novel can be “unsubtle” with “stakes and morality…clear from the start” and noted it “occasionally gets didactic” with “an ending that’s simply too eventful to have much impact.” However, she concluded: “What saves the book from sentimentality, and makes it a true literary achievement, is the attention and beauty with which Majumdar evokes the details of love. Detail is the strongest thing in A Guardian and a Thief. It conveys the nuances of not only love but also wisdom, outweighing the book’s shortcomings. It also makes this novel, wrenching though it often is, a true joy to read.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff wrote: “Wondering if there’s a novel out there that gives Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” a run for its money? Here you go.

The Washington Post’s review emphasized the novel’s anxiety-inducing power: “Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ is such an anxious book that even when you finally put it down, you’ll hear it sitting there on the shelf, panting.” The outlet praised its structure as reminiscent of “a fairy tale, which helps account for the deep, visceral terror the story generates.”

Kirkus Reviews awarded the novel a starred review, calling it “an electrifying depiction of dignity and morality under siege” and praising Majumdar’s ability to blend “gorgeous writing and the pacing of a thriller.” The review highlighted how “the way Majumdar manages to connect all the storylines with a resolution that unfolds both globally and in one small living room is genius.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette declared: “A Guardian and a Thief is an achievement. It deserves praise. It deserves study. It deserves to be read, and sat with, and thought about. The craft of this novel is something approaching immaculate.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune called it “a contemporary classic,” while The New Yorker praised it as “adroitly plotted” and “Majumdar’s unstintingly graceful political novel has the grip of a nail-biter.”

Oprah’s Endorsement and Popular Reception

Oprah Winfrey selected “A Guardian and a Thief,” as her 119th Book Club pick, describing Majumdar as “wise beyond her years” and praising her ability to “bring in cultural conflicts and interweave the way people live and relate to each other in such a way that leaves us spellbound.”

In an Oprah’s Book Club podcast episode, Winfrey and Majumdar discussed the novel with readers at a Starbucks coffeehouse in New York City. Oprah noted that the book “packs an epic story into just 224 pages” and called readers’ journey through it “harrowing” as they experience “the consequences and moral implications of…life-and-death choices.”

TIME Magazine, in naming it one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2025, described the novel as “a piercing and empathetic examination of the moral complexities of survival and how love can blur the lines between right and wrong in the face of disaster.”

From Kolkata to Hunter College

Born and raised in Kolkata, Megha Majumdar moved to the United States at age 19 to attend Harvard University, where she was a Traub Scholar and studied anthropology. She earned a master’s degree in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University before completing an MFA in Creative Fiction at Hunter College in 2011.

Hunter College’s website identifies Majumdar as a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department, where she now teaches creative writing. Hunter Arts Legacy notes she returned to the college as a Visiting Professor in 2024, teaching in the same MFA program where she once studied.

Her debut novel, “A Burning,” published in 2020, became a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. In India, it won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. “A Burning” was named one of the best books of 2020 by The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME. Ron Charles of The Washington Post called it “the must-read novel of summer 2020.”

Majumdar is a 2022 Whiting Award winner and has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden foundations. Before teaching, she served as editor in chief of Catapult books.

Speaking with NPR’s Book of the Day, Majumdar explained her decision to set the novel in a near-future rather than present-day Kolkata. “I think I was paying attention to a question that emerged while thinking about my hometown, Kolkata, and how profoundly it has already been affected by climate change,” she said. The novel addresses urgent questions about “class disparities and resource scarcity, asking who gets to escape crises and who does not.”

This story, conceptualized and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk, was aggregated by AI from several news reports.