Description

‘A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty’ Salman Rushdie

‘If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The Wire, this would be it’ Barbara Ehrenreich

Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India’s booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal.

As Boo gets to know those who dwell in Mumbai’s margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.

‘A triumph of a book. A beautiful account of the sorrows and joys, anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India’ Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics

‘Magnificent…a masterpiece… Quite simply, one of the finest works on contemporary India yet written’ Sunday Telegraph

Publisher Review

"[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." --Janet Maslin, "The New York Times" "A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction...With a cinematic intensity...Boo transcends and subverts every cliche, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you'll not soon forget." --"Elle " "Riveting, fearlessly reported....["Beautiful Forevers"]""plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it's also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A." --"Entertainment Weekly" "A tough-minded, inspiring, and irresistible book ... Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as importantly, she makes us care." --"People" (four stars) "Extraordinary." --"The New York Times Book Review" "A shocking--and riveting--portrait of life in modern India. ... This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction ... Boo's prose is electric." --"O," The Oprah Magazine "Gripping...A brilliant novelistic narration." -"Wall Street Journal " "Moving.... a humane, powerful and insightful book....A book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame." -- "Boston Globe" "A mind-blowing re