A landmark debut from a Pulitzer-winning New Yorker journalist: if Dickens were alive today, this is the book he might have written about India
Katherine Boo is an investigative journalist focusing on matters of poverty and opportunity. A staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2001, she was previously a writer and editor at 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 is her first book.
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... A brilliant book that simultaneously informs,
agitates, angers, inspires and instigates.
*Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics*
One's first reaction is disbelief followed by stunned silence...
takes us into the very engine room of the undercity and shines a
light on each of the cogs and ratchets... Adamantine, unignorable,
truthful.
*The Times*
Magnificent... Boo does not flinch from addressing Mumbai's social
inequalities, in particular the plight of its underclass... A
masterpiece... quite simply, one of the finest works on
contemporary India yet written.
*Sunday Telegraph*
One of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I've
ever read. If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The
Wire, this would be it.
*Barbara Ehrenreich*
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is already a legend...It cannot be
dismissed as yet another lazy excursion into slum poverty tourism,
or as an outsider's account of India... Unforgettable.
*Business Standard*
It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as
rich and beautifully written as a novel. In the hierarchy of long
form reporting, Katherine Boo is right up there.
*David Sedaris*
Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and
beautifully, but Boo is not a novelist. She is a rare deep-digging
journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian
with a superb sense of human drama.
*New York Times*
Kate Boo's reporting is a form of kinship. There are books that
change the way you feel and see; this is one of them. If we receive
the fiery spirit from which it was written, it ought to change much
more than that.
*Adrian LeBlanc, author of Random Family*
Without question the best book thus written on contemporary
India.
*Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi*
A fantastic book.
*New Yorker*
A superb book.
*Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains*
Remember the title Behind the Beautiful Forevers because you will
see it on upcoming nominee lists for the next round of Very
Important Literary Prizes... An unforgettable true story,
meticulously researched with unblinking honesty ... it is pure,
astonishing reportage.
*Christian Science Monitor*
There are cult filmmakers and cult novelists, but Katherine Boo may
be the world's only cult journalist.
*Salon*
Extraordinary... Behind the Beautiful Forevers does not descend
into a catalog of atrocity... The product of prolonged and risky
self-exposure to Annawadi, the book's narrative stitches, with much
skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual
lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo's
soberly elegant prose... Perhaps wisely, Boo has absented herself
from the narrative... Instead of the faux-na?f explainer or the
intrepid adventurer in Asian badlands, you get a reflective
sensibility, subtly informing every page with previous experiences
of deprivation and striving, and a gentle skepticism about
ideological claims.
*New York Times*
Character development. An acute ear for dialogue and idiom. A sense
of place. These are the essential ingredients of a good novel. So
what's a fiction writer like me supposed to do when Boo employs all
these and writes a book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most
novels to shame? How can I not envy a work that takes us on
harrowing journey into an unfamiliar world of an urban slum and
makes us citizens of that world? To add salt to my literary wounds:
That slum is located in Mumbai, the city of my birth, one I've
written about frequently, and until now, claimed to know and
understand. It turns out I knew little. And understood even
less.
*Boston Globe*
Katherine Boo's extraordinary first book is... above all, a moral
enquiry. Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of
politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed,
the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to
figure out "Mrs. Dalloway" while her closest friend, about to be
forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies
(though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees,
or $100, from her parents).
*New York Times*
A riveting, fearlessly reported portrait of a poverty so
obliterating that it amounts to a slow-motion genocide. Behind the
Beautiful Forevers will be one of the year's big books - a
conversation starter, an award winner... The book plays out like a
swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so
damn well.
*Entertainment Weekly*
An astoundingly well-reported and beautifully crafted book on 21st
century India...distilled into prose that blows you away with its
beauty, wit and restraint.
*Outlook India*
[Has the suspense, sensation and tragedy of a novel, except that
every word is real.
*The Hindu*
Remarkable.
*New York Review of Books*
A bravura work of non-fiction that goes beyond clichéd, patronising
depictions of poverty to raise uncomfortable questions about
justice and opportunity for India's urban poor in the age of global
market capitalism ... Thanks to the transcendent quality of Boo's
prose, this "sumpy plug of slum" springs to life with all the drama
and vividness of great fiction ... Boo's great achievement is to
have overcome barriers of language, culture and ethnicity to get
inside the minds of her subjects to decode their innermost
thoughts. And because she has written about the everyday
experiences of real people, using real names, we get to rub our
noses in the dirt of Annawadi, see the world through their
eyes.
*FT*
Must read: a Mumbai slum imagined and understood as never before in
language of intense beauty.
*Salman Rushdie*
Boo's descriptions of life within are almost Dickensian, as are her
characters ... The language of the book is beautiful, and she
reconstructs scenes through endless interviews with her
subjects.
*Telegraph*
Deploying spare, unadorned prose, Boo throws the slumdwellers into
such sharp relief that, reading the book, one has the sense of
seeing them at first hand ... By absenting herself, Boo endows her
writing with an uncommon immediacy.
*Independent on Sunday*
A powerful and sobering book.
*Conde Nast Traveller*
A small masterpiece of documentary storytelling. In its subject
matter of poverty, its meticulous research and Boo's great gift for
sympathy, the book seems an obvious next step in a successful
career.
*Guardian*
An extraordinary, intimate and gripping book, which it is no
exaggeration to describe as a milestone in writing about poverty,
and already one of this year's most memorable reads ... Boo's
seamlessly structured narrative allows these stories to unfold
alongside the personal dramas of the characters. Her tone is
admirably restrained, and never patronising or mawkish ... The
close focus of Behind the Beautiful Forevers is what gives it its
clarity, and makes it so affecting.
*Evening Standard*
In the end one puts down this impressive work relieved that one can
rest from the remorselessness of its tragedies yet grateful one has
learned about them from a writer who combines such innate human
sympathy with such high literary skill. We can be grateful too to
that unabridged dictionary for serving an unintended purpose.
*Spectator*
A small masterpiece ... thanks to several years of rigorous
research on the ground, following her characters around as they
live their lives, months of research retrieving court documents
through India's Right to Information Act, and, most of all, through
close observation and a deep human empathy, Boo has created as
detailed, convincing and moving a portrait of urban deprivation as
The Road to Wigan Pier. Throughout, Boo writes beautifully and,
given her subject, surprisingly wittily. She is also wonderfully
observant of human quirks ... There have been many attempts by
writers in recent years to pin to the page the hopes and fears of
the new India. Most have attempted to do so by giving a sense of
the extraordinary scale of the changes transforming the world's
largest democracy. Yet by homing in on one small group of
characters, the bit-part players in the story of India's
development, Boo has succeeded better than any of them in showing
both the possibilities, and the human cost, of India's great leap
forward.
*Observer*
A remarkable book ... In the end one puts down this impressive work
relieved that one can rest from the remorselessness of its
tragedies yet grateful one has learned about them from a writer who
combines such innate human sympathy with such high literary skill.
We can be grateful too to that unabridged dictionary for serving an
unintended purpose.
*Spectator*
Reads so much like a well-crafted novel ... A compelling book which
combines the skills of journalistic reportage and emotive
storytelling, and excels at both.
*Herald*
Most recent books about the country, unselfconsciously suffused
with the clichés of the age, speak of how free-market capitalism
has ignited a general explosion of opportunity, fostering hope
among the most destitute of Indians. Boo describes what really
happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the
age of globalisation, when governments remain dysfunctional and
corrupt.
*Scotsman*
This is an astonishing book. It is astonishing on several levels:
as a worm's-eye view of the "undercity" of one of the world's
largest metropolises; as an intensely reported, deeply felt account
of the lives, hopes and fears of people traditionally excluded from
literate narratives; as a story that truly hasn't been told before,
at least not about India and not by a foreigner ... The result is a
searing account, in effective and racy prose, that reads like a
thrilling novel but packs a punch Sinclair Lewis might have
envied.
*Washington Post*
Behind the Beautiful Forevers neither sensationalises the squalor
nor judges those responsible for it. Boo's studied understatement,
her obsession with authenticity and her almost painful empathy are
eloquent enough ... Honest and often deeply affecting, Katherine
Boo's book deserves a place alongside the award-winning studies of
North Korea and Sarajevo by Barbara Demick.
*Literary Review*
An exceptional work of reportage ... Boo makes no attempt to
disguise the miseries involved in living close to a vast pool of
sewage on land where feral pigs gorge on rotting leftovers from the
airport hotels. She does not pretend that the Annawadians possess
virtues that they do not. However, she does grant them
individuality and respect, as real people, whose many pains and
occasional pleasures she evokes with great skill and empathy.
*Sunday Times*
A small classic of contemporary writing.
*Guardian*
A page-turner with a gripping human story, this is essential
reading for anyone interested in the real India.
*Mail on Sunday*
Her prose is so beautiful, witty and economical, her narrative so
powerful, that it's easy to forget this is an unprecedented piece
of investigative journalism as well.
*Financial Times*
Boo produces a gripping narrative of urban deprivation, underworld
scams, sexual abuse, social injustice and human tragedy... Boo
shows the human cost of Mumbai's burgeoning economic prosperity
with disturbing brilliance.
*Metro*
Read this book for its insights into the wealth divide that exists
in India's "richest" city. But also enjoy its ability to entertain
as a novel does.
*Evening Chronicle*
The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the
narrative stitches, with much skilfully unspoken analysis, some
carefully researched individual lives... [It has] considerable
literary power.
*Scotsman*
An exceptional piece of reportage.
*Sunday Times Must Reads*
An inspiring portrait of the human struggle to make a home in the
most hellish situation.
*Woman & Home*
Honest and often deeply affecting, Boo's book deserves a place
alongside the award-winning studies of North Korea and war-torn
Sarajevo by Barbara Demick.
*Literary Review*
If you have no idea what life in the slums is like then I suspect
this book will shock you. I can see why many people are naming it
as their book of the year.
*Farm Lane Books*
The hope - and the hopelessness - recorded here is utterly
heartbreaking, but never mawkish or indulgent... Starkly documents
the ever-growing disparity between India's rich and poor... Truly
important'
*Daily Telegraph*
[A] finely hewn, gently humoured and tough-minded work of lasting
import. Behind the Beautiful Forevers combines ethical clarity and
writerly exactitude to stimulate outrage and unsettling
pleasure
*Independent*
Vivid and full of insight
*Prospect*
In this tough-minded debut, [Boo] asks why the poor don't rise up,
and why unequal societies don't implode. Her answers are embedded
in a narrative as pacy as a thriller
*Intelligent Life*
Boo takes us to the slums of Mumbai and paints a vivid pictue of
both poverty and resistance
*Belfast Telegraph*
A book of extraordinary intelligence, humanity and (formalistic)
cunning... [Boo] humanizes with all the force of literature the
impossible lives of the people at bottom of our pharaonic global
order, and details with a journalist's unsparing exactitude the
absolute suffering that undergirds India's economic boom. The
portraits [are] indelible... groundbreaking
*Junot Díaz*
This is reality - and a shocking one at that
*New Internationalist*
[A] heartbreaking account of life in a Mumbai slum
*Telegraph*
Behind the Beautiful Forevers reads like a novel by Dickens, but is
a real-life depiction of the challenges hundreds of millions of
people face every day in urban slums. It's also a reminder of the
humanity that connects us all
*Bill Gates*
Astonishingly vivid, beautifully written
*The Lady*
The level of attention she gives the people in her book is so
profound and respectful
*Guernica Magazine*
Skilful and compassionate writing without sentimentality or mythic
abstraction
*Times Literary Supplement*
A remarkable debut... The book's strength lies in its relentless
focus on the grim human realities of poverty
*Culture Show*
Boo seems to have expanded the possibilities of the form with her
scrupulous, novelistic imaginings of the thoughts of Mumbai
slum-dwellers
*Guardian*
An exemplary piece of deep reporting... Meticulous and gripping
*Sunday Times*
The narrative is so immediate and absorbing that I had stop and
turn to the notes at the back to check that it really was a
documentary account... A passionate work of reportage
*Daily Telegraph*
She doesn't preach, she's not voyeuristic and rather than intrude
on the action she saves the story of her own involvement for the
afterword... A triumph
*Guardian*
Looks hard into places of extreme despair, and comes back brimming
with irrepressible life... A masterpiece
*Observer*
Boo's masterclass in reportage is remarkable
*Observer*
You put it down enraged, entertained and richly informed about
people who live in makeshift quarters at the end of an airport
runway
*Guardian*
She has the insight of a novelist [but] retains the integrity of a
uncompromising investigative reporter
*Times Literary Supplement*
The harsh life of a Mumbai slum vividly recreated on the page in
beautiful prose. Her characters are irresistibly alive. No slumdogs
or millionaires here. Just the truth
*The Times*
Boo's praised account of the residents of Annawadi, a slum in the
shadow of luxury hotels near Mumbai airport
*Financial Times*
A classic... Combines a cool intelligence with a cinematic eye for
detail
*Intelligent Life*
A devastating portrayal of street-dwellers struggling to survive
against insurmountable odds
*Sunday Herald*
A fascinating, insightful and heartfelt piece of extended
reportage
*Metro*
Boo has given us an insightful portrait of slum life
*New Left Review*
A small masterpiece
*Oldie*
A worm's eye view of the corruption and gross inequality of the new
India, which was ecstatically reviewed from New York to New
Delhi
*The Week*
Fascinating... Boo makes no political comment about the need for
change but rather, like good writers before her who describe
appalling inequalities, she allows her characters to speak for
themselves
*Camden New Journal*
She grants the residents respect as real people, evoking their many
pains and occasional pleasures with great skill and empathy
*Sunday Times*
A small classic of contemporary writing
*Guardian*
Vivid
*Asian Affairs*
Remarkable
*Prospect*
Painstaking reportage... page-turning in its novelistic sweep...
meticulously researched. Vivid, clear-eyed, often bruising
detail
*Independent on Sunday*
My favourite non-fiction book about the subcontinent, but one that
reads like a soap opera. The tragedies, loves, disappointments and
joys of the slum-dwellers of Mumbai are brought thrillingly to life
by the author, who lived among them for two years. A testimony to
brute survival and the human spirit.
*Week*
With her precise descriptions of relationships and the tragic lives
of her characters, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers
reads like expertly crafted fiction
*Wired*
A book [which] is no longer on the frontlist, but provide[s] vital
ways for us to deepen the conversation... [it] stays with the
reader and audience alike
*Bookseller*
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