BookBrowse Reviews A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

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In Megha Majumdar's tense second novel, two Indian families struggle desperately for better lives in a country rapidly changing due to global warming.

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A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar's second novel—her first, 2020's A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award—is set in near-future Kolkata. The city has been heavily impacted by climate change: temperatures have skyrocketed, potable water is in short supply, and a famine is underway due to crop loss. Coastal residences are flooding due to rising sea levels (see Beyond the Book), so people are migrating to Kolkata in the hopes of finding work, straining the few resources available. The novel's protagonist, Ma, plans to escape this nightmare by joining her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he works as a scientist. When the book opens, Ma has obtained the passport she needs to emigrate, along with passports for her elderly father, Dadu, and her two-year-old daughter, Mishti. But when her purse containing the documents is stolen, she has just seven days to track down the thief and retrieve the paperwork before her family's visas expire and they're unable to leave the country.

A second storyline follows Boomba, a refugee from a small coastal town who has come to Kolkata to earn enough money to relocate his imperiled family. Unable to find employment, he ends up staying in the community shelter managed by Ma, where he observes her stealing eggs from the facility's storeroom. Starving and correctly assuming that she's stockpiling food, he follows her home and robs her house—taking her purse almost as an afterthought.

The high-stress plot that follows combines Ma's frantic search for the passports with Boomba's equally desperate efforts to find a way to help his own family. Majumdar has an amazing ability to put readers in her characters' shoes and feel their pain. Some of the situations each character endures are truly gut-wrenching; more than once I felt queasy as Ma's or Boomba's circumstances became dramatically worse.

Majumdar imbues each of her characters with an intriguing moral ambiguity. It's clear early on that the question of who is the titular guardian and who is the thief is not a straightforward one—both characters assume both roles throughout the story. Boomba seems callous and self-interested until we learn that his primary motivation is his younger brother's well-being, and that he blames himself for his family's dire situation. Ma will do anything for her daughter, but her charity is limited. When a man passes out in front of her, for example, others offer him a wet handkerchief, but Ma ignores him. "What if Mishti needed the handkerchief?" she asks herself to justify her selfishness.

Even non-central characters are drawn vividly; Dadu in particular is a highlight. He is willing to leave the country to support his daughter and grandchild but fantasizes about staying behind. "Wouldn't it be a relief if his passport—only his—tore?" Majumdar writes. "Then it would be as if fate had directed him to remain in Kolkata." Dadu, too, has his own moral failures; at one point he accidentally starts a food riot, but then joins those stealing provisions.

Majumdar also includes vignettes about the residents of Kolkata—a rickshaw driver, a barber, a stationer, and more—providing insight into their lives. These passages are seldom longer than a paragraph or two, but they provide rich detail, rounding out the portrait of the city:

"Up and working through it was the ironing man, a man known to all who lived in the neighborhood, in his shed, his torso folded over a board, on one side a heap of wrinkled garments, on the other a stack of pressed ones, his hand upon the carved wooden handle of an iron, its chamber loaded with hot coals. In the small awning of his shed, Dadu, Ma, and Mishti paused, their umbrellas feeble against the rain."

A Guardian and a Thief is short—just over 200 pages—but that doesn't mean it's a light read. Majumdar forces us to do some soul-searching, to ask ourselves to what lengths we ourselves would go in order to protect those we love. It's not an easy question, and the novel will leave readers pondering their own answers long after turning the last page.

This review first ran in the November 19, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.