Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay in 1952 into the city's Parsi community and studied mathematics and economics at the University of Bombay. In 1975 he moved to Toronto, worked in a bank, and later took a degree in English and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Fiction came after that: two of his student stories won the university's literary prize in consecutive years.
Nearly everything he has published is rooted in Bombay, even though he has written it from Canada. His first book, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), links stories about the residents of a single apartment compound. The three novels that followed are Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002). Family life, poverty, discrimination and the damage that politics and institutions do to ordinary people run through all of them. The prose is patient and realist, with a good deal of humour, and interviewers have often compared him to nineteenth-century novelists.
Such a Long Journey won the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and became a feature film in 1998. All three novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A Fine Balance won the Giller Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Oprah's Book Club chose it in 2001. In 2012 Mistry received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Start with A Fine Balance. It follows four people who end up sharing a small flat in an Indian city during the Emergency of 1975, and it is his most decorated novel. If it holds you, go back to Such a Long Journey, the story of a bank clerk in Bombay in 1971, then on to Family Matters, which turns to old age and the strain it puts on a household.
