A Fine Balance
The epic modern classic
-
-
4.5 • 11 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
'A towering masterpiece by a writer of genius.'Independent
'A masterpiece of illumination and grace. Like all great fiction, it transforms our understanding of life.' Guardian
India, 1975. An unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency. Amidst a backdrop of wild political turmoil, the lives of four unlikely strangers collide forever.
An epic panorama of modern India in all its corruption, violence, and heroism, A Fine Balanceis Rohinton Mistry's prize-winning masterpiece: a Dickensian modern classic brimming with compassion, humour, and insight - and a hymn to the human spirit in an inhuman state.
'Magical.'New York Times
'Monumental.'Time
'Astonishing.' Wall Street Journal
What readers are saying:
'One of the most layered and beautifully executed books I've ever read ... Easily one of my all time favourite books!'
'Many say that the mark of a good book is that it stays with you; well, I read this several years ago and I still find myself thinking of the characters ... Beautiful.'
'What a storyteller, what a wide canvas he covers of India ... Wonderful.'
'One of the best and most entertaining books I have ever read ... I can't recommend it highly enough.'
'Often heartbreaking, always evocative ... A book to savour rather than to gallop through.'
'One of the best books I've read ... Not a book for the faint-hearted, but it is a book with a big heart.'
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In 1970s India—a period of great upheaval—the lives of four families change drastically. Thrown together, a group of disparate people overcome all that divides them to find what unifies them. This thought-provoking book leaves the reader feeling they’ve undergone a transformation along with the characters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The setting of Mistry's quietly magnificent second novel (after the acclaimed Such a Long Journey) is India in 1975-76, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, defying a court order calling for her resignation, declares a state of emergency and imprisons the parliamentary opposition as well as thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists and journalists. These events, along with the government's forced sterilization campaign, serve as backdrop for an intricate tale of four ordinary people struggling to survive. Naive college student Maneck Kohlah, whose parents' general store is failing, rents a room in the house of Dina Dalal, a 40-ish widowed seamstress. Dina acquires two additional boarders: hapless but enterprising itinerant tailor Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash, whose father, a village untouchable, was murdered as punishment for crossing caste boundaries. With great empathy and wit, the Bombay-born, Toronto-based Mistry evokes the daily heroism of India's working poor, who must cope with corruption, social anarchy and bureaucratic absurdities. Though the sprawling, chatty narrative risks becoming as unwieldy as the lives it so vibrantly depicts, Mistry combines an openness to India's infinite sensory detail with a Dickensian rendering of the effects of poverty, caste, envy, superstition,corruption and bigotry. His vast, wonderfully precise canvas poses, but cannot answer, the riddle of how to transform a corrupt, ailing society into a healthy one.
