Choosing a book to spotlight at the end of 2025 isn’t easy. We wanted to pick a book with themes that align with the year that was, but at the same time was gripping enough for readers to make time for it during the constant distractions of December. A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar is that book. In just 200 pages, the award-winning climate fiction novel presents a world running out of water, food, even air. It’s set in the future, but it feels too real in our AQI-obsessed world. It’s fast-paced, and short—a perfect weekend binge-read for anyone struggling to reach their end-of-the-year reading goals.
So, what is A Guardian and a Thief about?
Set in a near-future, almost dystopian Kolkata, one ravaged by food shortages and an unbearable heat, the book features two protagonists. There’s the ‘guardian’ aka Ma, her two-year-old daughter, Mishti, and her elderly father, Dadu—a regular Indian upper middle-class family struggling to survive in the crumbling city. Just as they are preparing to leave Kolkata to join Ma’s husband in the United States, armed with their precious, freshly procured climate visas, a thief steals them.
Enter our second protagonist, the ‘thief’, Boomba—a man driven by hunger and desperation, who lives in a shelter where Ma works. He’s seen Ma pilfer food from the shelter and follows her home, confident that he’ll find enough sustenance in her home. And he’s right, but in addition to the food he also steals her purse that contains the all-important visas. Boomba is the first villain of the story, but that’s before you hear his story.
Why should I pick it?
“What was absolutely true and right, and what was absolutely false and wrong, and how could any sane person live without crossing the borders every day?” In A Guardian and a Thief, Majumdar does not waste any precious words. Her prose, plot construction, and dialogue will make readers pause and ponder. All the characters are carefully etched, not just the protagonists. There’s a rich benefactress who lives on a hexagon island throwing ‘benevolent’ feasts for the public, a blonde immigration officer with a mother back home in Texas, and Boomba’s brother, Robi, a four-year-old obsessed with mosquito nets.
While the themes the book touches upon, like climate crisis, famine, and bureaucracy, are described with extreme care and poignancy, the thread that ties it all together is extremely relatable—family and the lengths one can go to protect theirs. One wants to feed her daughter cauliflower whenever she wants, to provide the luxury of air conditioning in heatstroke-inducing weather, another just wants to give them a life better than the one they currently inhabit. “Wouldn’t you do anything for your child? Wouldn’t you plead before an officer, very much like this, for your child?”
At 200 pages, this heart-wrenching novel is the perfect read to pad up your 2025 reading list. With its dwindling moral compass, it makes you think: Who’s the guardian? Who’s the thief? You decide.
Tell me a little about the author
Majumdar’s debut novel, the New York Times bestseller A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. In India, it won a Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. A Guardian and a Thief is her second novel and is also an Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction, National Book Award Finalist for Fiction, and Kirkus Prize Nominee for Fiction. Majumdar is the recipient of a Whiting Award, as well as of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden foundations. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, and educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, she now lives in New York.
