Awards

• Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Award 2012
• Winner of National Book Award Non-Fiction 2012

Overview

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees a fortune beyond counting in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's most-everything girl - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call the full enjoy. But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

Full Product Details

9781743178171

Table of Contents

Reviews

Must read. Katherine Boo Behind the Beautiful Forevers . A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty. -- Salman Rushdie The even-handedness that stems from Katherine Boo's natural and abundant empathy is one of the many appeals of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, her gorgeous book on one of Mumbai's slums, Annawadi...The book contains a particularly important message for those who have monopolised the ear of the Indian government's key leaders, and who place their hopes for the poor in financial handouts and empowerment through legal rights. -- Business Standard The words of Boo and the inhabitants of Annawadi rushed through me like a river, cracking open thoughts of how hard this work is, my anger at those who demand simple solutions and expect easy returns; yet, at the sametime, pushing me more urgently to find voice, to speak truth when it hurts. For all of this, I am grateful to the author for her courage, persistence, and openness. -- The Huffington Post Riveting...[A] stunning piece of narrative nonfiction; it not only reports on some of the world's poorest people and their dizzying resourcefulness and criminality but portrays them in all their humanity. -- O, The Oprah Magazine [An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. .... Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted. -- The New York Times The book plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel....Boo gives even the broadest themes (the collateral damage of globalization, say) a human face. And there are half a dozen characters here so indelible - so swept up in impossible dreams and schemes - that they call Dickens and Austen to mind. -- Entertainment Weekly This is an astonishing book. It is astonishing on several levels: as a worm's-eye view of the undercity of one of the world's largest metropolises; as an intensely reported, deeply felt account of the lives, hopes and fears of people traditionally excluded from literate narratives; as a story that truly hasn't been told before, at least not about India and not by a foreigner. But most of all, it is astonishing that it exists at all.... a searing account, in effective and racy prose, that reads like a thrilling novel but packs a punch Sinclair Lewis might have envied. -- The Washington Post

Author Information

Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. This is her first book. Sunil Malhotra's film credits include Dude, Where's the Party?; Call Center; 24; ER; Cold Case; and The West Wing. On stage, he's performed on Broadway, in Mark Taper Forum's New Works Festival, and at EastWest Players. He is also a writer and director. His recording of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese garnered numerous awards, including the AudioFile Earphones Award.

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