From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo comes a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the world’s most lively but treacherous cities.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: even the poorest of them believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call ‘the full enjoy’.
But then Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
With intelligence, humour, and deep insight, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the 21st century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.
KATHERINE BOO, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has spent the last 20 years reporting from within poor communities, considering how societies distribute opportunity and how individuals get out of poverty. Her reporting has been honoured by a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ grant, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Boo was also an editor of The Washington Monthly and, for nearly a decade, a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. This is her first book.