a book

A Fine Balance

Name: A Fine Balance
Rating: 5 (8 reviews)
Author: Rohinton Mistry
ISBN: 9781400030651

Rohinton Mistry · 1997 · 603 pages

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

recommended by 8 people

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Alicia Keys
“Now, on 2 more studious & sensible topics...reading an INCREDIBLE book "A Fine Balance" Set n 1970's India. WOW! a gift from some1 @ a show!”↗
Jacqueline Novogratz
“A Dickensian novel that captures the essence of being poor in urban India in ways extraordinary and deeply human.”↗
Maggie Gyllenhaal
“You pick up this book and you’re hooked in ten pages. It’s an epic story set in India in the 1970s about a handful of characters who meet in a moment of kindness and live together for a period of time; then they separate again.”↗
Jamie Lee Curtis
“Mistry’s novel is gutting. Set in 1970s India, it introduced me to a world of hardships and class boundaries that I never knew. It’s a reality too hard to imagine, and yet it is happening, every second.”↗
Oprah Winfrey
Rupi Kaur
Michael Peel
Stuart Rutherford