Megha Majumdar's highly anticipated second novel, 'A Guardian and a Thief', arrives with the heavyweight endorsement of Oprah's Book Club, destined for the kind of widespread popularity reminiscent of a Karan Johar film. Published to readers on December 7, 2025, the book, however, finds itself at the centre of a critical debate: does its polished, American MFA-style narrative gloss over and exoticise a reality that should feel intimately familiar to its Indian audience?
A Tale of Hunger, Theft, and a Climate Visa
The novel plunges readers into a Kolkata gripped by a climate-change-induced famine. The story unfolds over seven tense days, centred on a family unit: a child, the mother (Ma), and Dadu—the loving grandfather and a Calcutta man to his soul. Their world is defined by a visceral hunger for food—deem (eggs), phulkopi (cauliflower), ilish (hilsa fish), and the scarcely dreamt-of mangsho (meat). This craving is more than physical; it's a memory of security and a lost world.
Majumdar masterfully establishes the central paradox from the outset: Ma is both a guardian and a thief. She is desperately navigating the final week in their hellish home before the family can join her husband in a promised land of "milk and honey" on a special "climate visa." Their path crosses with Boomba, a thief from a world seemingly far removed from their middle-class struggles, who undergoes his own transformation into a guardian. As homes become fortresses—breached and lost—each character, bound by duty, morphs into something both less and more than they imagined.
The trajectory is clear from Day One: no happy ending awaits. The narrative is a structured tragedy, guiding the reader through intended emotions, culminating in a hurried, eventful climax that delivers a message on morality, family, and the meaning of home.
The Craft and The Critique: An MFA Sheen?
There is no denying Majumdar's skill. Her prose is often lyrical, and her descriptions of food, hunger, and a city fading into memory are deft. Yet, for many, the novel leaves a sense of being cheated. The critique, as noted by writer Aakash Joshi, points to a feeling that the book is trying to be too many things at once.
It feels desperate to tick all the relevant thematic boxes: climate change, human selfishness, the capriciousness of American power, the NRI longing for home, and even an arguably forced billionaire character. In this race, the core story can feel lost, serving primarily as a vessel for its themes. The prose, while cinematic and accessible—dubbed "Jhumpa Lahiri lite"—bears the hallmark of a talented writer refined by an American Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme.
The central problem, as identified in the review, is that this style of writing, despite its authentic details, can make the familiar feel exotic. It risks turning a deeply local Kolkata story into a product for a global, primarily Western, audience—akin to watching a Satyajit Ray classic remade by Karan Johar.
Destined for Popularity in an Attention-Deficit World
Ultimately, 'A Guardian and a Thief' is perfectly tailored for the current moment. Its bleak setting allows it to mimic beauty with ease. It's a quick read—a long short story posing as a novel—suited for an attention-deficit world. It possesses enough layered ambiguity to fuel multiple perspectives and heated debates in any book club, and its cinematic quality hints at clear potential for a mini-series or film adaptation.
Yet, as the review concludes with a sporting analogy, all the popularity and critical success in the world, like making a pickleball champion, does not automatically translate to the legacy of a Roger Federer. The novel is brilliant and clever, perhaps "too clever by half," achieving widespread appeal while sparking essential conversations about who gets to tell which stories and for whom.
