Author
A Guardian and a Thief
A Guardian and a Thief is a 2025 novel by Indian author Megha Majumdar, set in a near-future Kolkata buckling under climate catastrophe. Over seven days, two families become entangled: Ma, who manages a homeless shelter and is days from emigrating to the United States with her elderly father and toddler daughter, and Boomba, a young man at her shelter who breaks into their home seeking food and inadvertently steals their climate visas. As their desperate paths intersect and diverge, the novel interrogates the moral boundaries of survival, the ferocity of parental love, and the human toll of a collapsing climate. Majumdar's spare, compressed prose moves with the urgency of a thriller while sustaining the moral ambiguity characteristic of literary fiction, grounding a global crisis in the intimate stakes of two households.