Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum
Feb 2012 · Portobello Books
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'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
'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
'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. ...
Ratings and reviews
7 reviews
Oliver Turner
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September 4, 2013
Informative on how the bottom. Class of people strive through life
1 person found this review helpful
About the author
KATHERINE BOO is an investigative journalist focusing on matters of poverty and
opportunity, and has worked as staff writer and editor for the New Yorker magazine and the Washington Post. Among the honours her work has received are a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant, a National Magazine Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This, her first book, won the 2012 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
KATHERINE BOO is an investigative journalist focusing on matters of poverty and
opportunity, and has worked as staff writer and editor for the New Yorker magazine and the Washington Post. Among the honours her work has received are a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant, a National Magazine Award,...
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