A Burning: A Read with Jenna Pick
A Novel
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4.0 • 290 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK! • A "gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary" (USA Today) about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor—has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.
Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning is an electrifying debut.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Set in modern-day India, Megha Majumdar’s powerful debut novel explores timely themes: the rise of nationalist politics and the way inequality makes our institutions unjust. But big topics aside, A Burning is simply a suspenseful and page-turning read that’s populated with vivid characters who imprint themselves on the imagination. Jivan, the only child of a couple who’ve endured crushing poverty their whole lives, hopes to turn her family’s fortunes around, leaving high school to take a reliable retail job. Smart and capable, Jivan’s also generous. She puts her education to good use by teaching English to Lovely, a hijra (transgender) woman who lives nearby in the same slum and dreams of becoming a movie star. But when Jivan is falsely accused of participating in a deadly terrorist attack, the two people best positioned to help her—her former pupil and her most supportive teacher—make self-serving decisions with catastrophic implications. We tore through this electric, fast-moving story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Majumdar's audacious debut, a politically conscious English tutor who works with an aspiring film actor is wrongfully accused of terrorism. After an ill-advised Facebook post criticizing the police's response to a train bombing in Bengal, Jivan, a Muslim, is charged with the attack. Jivan has an alibi; she was on her way to tutor Lovely, whose testimony might be able to save Jivan from execution. A right-wing party luminary, hoping to gain political mileage from the case, bribes one of Jivan's former teachers from grammar school in exchange for his false testimony about Jivan, and his lies in court lead to Jivan being jailed. A large portion of the chapters devoted to Jivan, told in the first person, come in the form of expository monologues to Purnendu, a reporter. Lovely's dialect-heavy passages speak to her difficult life as a hijra (a third gender in India), and her desire to become a star despite being marginalized. Majumdar expertly weaves the book's various points of view and plotlines in ways that are both unexpected and inevitable. This is a memorable, impactful work.
Customer Reviews
See AllBrilliant
Megha Majumdar’s “A Burning” is a contemporary story following three people that are tied together by a shared past. That common connection is rushed into the present and placed under a bright spotlight by a tragic event. The character arcs, plot, and through lines weave masterfully together and play out against the backdrop of a changing India. A country trying to balance all of the social and economic challenges across its broad landscape and simultaneously create a coherence around a single national identity.
What Majmudar shows us is that, on the ground level, individual lives are so pressed for survival that they don’t have time to see their shared suffering. As a result, there are no real happy endings here. Majmudar’s greatest skill is her ability to pull the reader deep into each scene. She employs just the right details to place you right smack in the middle of the heat, noise, filth, scents, and sounds of the lives of our characters. The dialogue is punchy and underscores the culture and the various dynamics between the castes. It reads like an experiential journey through the crushing weight of over a billion people trying to chase one dream. That experience shattered routinely by violence; horrible acts flamed by the tensions that destroy the innocent and guilty alike.
The story stresses you in every way. Our characters are all pawns in a larger game played by others. All of them chasing after any semblance of agency over their seemingly predetermined fate. Each has to make moral compromises to find any path forward. All of this highlights that where there is no real concept and application of justice, there will be no recognition of individual humanity. In its place the novel reminds us that no good deed goes unpunished. Indeed, the best line in the book comes near the end when we are reminded that “Only one of us can be truly free.”
So captivatingly real
The three narratives in this book are so beautifully distinct- each with their own unique quirks, passions and pride-while still showing us what life is like when you’re poor or dedicated to your job or willing to do anything to be famous. This book has got a certain quality that people all over the internet yearn for. A 5/5 for me.
Phenomal insight to a corrupted government and the inequities of the poor
A woman, who was born a man had fought her way to a better life, working hard to help her parents out of the slums and hoping to become an actress. Along the way, she posts a politically inappropriate message on FB and is soon taken into custody and blamed for a horrific burning of a train and it’s passengers death by throwing fire into their compartments ultimately killing over 100 people.
She is innocent yet the police and political unrest in the county needs someone to blame. After a harrowing unfair and unjust one sided trial she is sentenced to death. Those who could have saved her were bullied by the government, their own self preservation becoming a priority and others were bought off by officials. It is a terribly difficult story to read, yet resonated loudly and had similar parallels to corrupt governments, politicians and police authorities not just in India but in our own country as well. Well written and the heartbreaking emotional connection the reader feels for all the characters is due to this authors skills and talent to not only make her characters human but to find and fully feel compassion for each of them. Well done!!