Megha Majumdar

Luminous. . . . 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.

An electrifying depiction of dignity and morality under siege. . . . With gorgeous writing and the pacing of a thriller, A Guardian and a Thief transports the reader to a world ravaged by drought, burning heat, and severe food scarcity. . . . The way Majumdar manages to connect all the storylines with a resolution that unfolds both globally and in one small living room is genius.

Riveting...This is a novel of our pandemic times, an exploration of precarity in all its forms...Majumdar excels at depicting the workings of power on the powerless... Fate has rarely been so many-faced, so muscular, so mercurial, or so mesmerizing as it is in A Burning.

Powerful... propulsive...This is a book to relish for its details, for the caress of the writer’s gaze against the world... The interplay of choice and circumstance has always been the playing field of great fiction, and on this terrain, a powerful new writer stakes her claim.

"Immersive...masterly... the elements of a thriller are transmuted into prismatic portraiture... A Burning has a similar urgency of appeal [to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.] Its characters are at the very front of the stage, and we can feel their breath... Her spare plot moves with arrowlike determination...I can’t remember when I last read a novel that so quickly dismantled the ordinary skepticism that attends the reading of made-up stories. Early Naipaul comes to mind as a precursor, and perhaps Akhil Sharma’s stupendously vivid novel "Family Life.”... It’s only at the end of this brief, brave novel that one becomes fully aware of how broad its judgments have been, how fierce and absolute its condemnations. Through the gaps that open up among and behind these three characters, a large Indian panoply emerges.”

Particularly relevant today... entertaining as well as intellectually serious... complex... nuanced... Captures the grainy specificity of life in India.

In her captivating debut novel A Burning, Megha Majumdar presents a powerful corrective to the political narratives that have dominated in contemporary India.

Remarkable…Early buzz is already comparing A Burning to the work of modern literary stars . . . but the voice—or voices—here are entirely Majumdar’s own.

Majumdar's explosive first novel is an intimate epic.

Combines fast-paced plotting with the kind of atmospheric detail one might find in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri or Daniyal Mueenuddin. . . A highly compelling read.

Unforgettable.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar is quietly beautiful and devastating. Its tone and pacing are measured perfectly. It is as funny as it is sad. This book won’t let you go, and you won’t want it to end.

Set in contemporary India, Majumdar's explosive first novel is an intimate epic following the threads of three disparate characters as their lives become knotted together in the wake of tragedy.

This is a novel of now: a beautifully constructed literary thriller from a rare and powerful new voice.

Megha Majumdar’s soon-to-be published A Burning is the best debut novel I have come across in a long time. Somehow Majumdar succeeds in capturing the boundless energy and starry-eyed hopefulness of the country’s youth. A Burning signals the arrival of a new voice of immense talent and promise.

Polyphonic…Lovely is a particular gem…brilliant.