What does it mean to survive when survival itself comes at the expense of others? That’s the central question explored in Megha Majumdar’s sophomore novel, A Guardian and a Thief. The story is set in a crumbling, near-future Kolkata grappling with environmental disaster and food shortages. It follows the intersecting paths of two families: Ma is preparing to flee with her daughter and elderly father to join her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan—until their passports are stolen. The thief, Boomba, a father himself, is desperate to provide food and shelter for his family as both run scarce. Over one tense week, both families are pushed to their limits in an unraveling city.
A Guardian and a Thief, already on the longlist for the 2025 National Book Award, represents a dynamic shift forward for Majumdar. Where her first novel, A Burning, which saw success as a Read with Jenna Pick, was precocious and scrappy, A Guardian and a Thief is sharp and expansive. Its maturity and richness allow Majumdar to tell a stirring story about the sacrifices required for survival and our own frailty in the face of societal collapse.
We spoke about the inexorable tension between individualism and collectivism, the usefulness of the label “climate fiction,” and the role of art in times of crisis.
Marisa Wright: I was struck by the opening scene where Ma sees someone riding a bike, carrying fruit, and singing, and immediately labels them a thief because she assumes such ease and nonchalance could only come from wrongdoing. We later learn Ma has been siphoning food and money from the nonprofit shelter she runs, but she is also the victim of a burglary by Boomba. How do you think about the psychology of rationalizing one’s own choices when facing exigent circumstances while condemning others?
Megha Majumdar: You’re right that the book is so much about questioning the gaps between our ideal ethical selves and who we might become in a time of scarcity and crisis. The book is very interested in this notion that we might identify acts as villainous or harmful when others perform them, but we might perform them ourselves and see them as necessary manifestations of our love and our hope for the people that we love. I wished to complicate the idea that there is a binary between something like hope, which must be noble and pure and unassailable, and something like harm or violence. How do we live when a community’s collective hope clashes with what an individual sees as their own hopeful act for their children?
MW: Even after Boomba engages in another wrongful act, you write, “Boomba was no monster. All Boomba was, was a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family. Wasn’t that the most ordinary thing in the world?” On one hand, I totally sympathize with prioritizing one’s family over others, but on the other, it makes me very sad about the nature of humanity and our inability to think collectively on a broad scale. When you wrote this, were you aiming for a fundamentally optimistic or cynical reading?
MM: That’s a great question. I’m thinking about your framing of optimism versus cynicism, and that’s part of what I was thinking through in this book. I was reading a lot about climate change, and one thing that I encountered over and over was declarations of hope. It put me in this space of thinking about what we mean by hope. Being optimistic is perhaps one thing for nations and systems, and quite another for individual, ordinary people. How will we live with ourselves if we find that for an ordinary person, what comes to the fore is their wish to protect their own loved ones, even at the cost of others? Is that a kind of love or hope that we can be proud of? Is that still a form of love that we feel able to get behind? I feel like I don’t really have answers, but the book helped me ask the questions with the rigor and intricacy that interested me.
MW: It seems to me that as the effects of climate change become more and more a part of our everyday lives, climate fiction is no longer really a distinct genre; it’s sadly more like realism now. Do you think “climate fiction” is still a useful label, or has it transformed into something that makes a distinction without a difference?
The book is so much about questioning the gaps between our ideal ethical selves and who we might become in a time of scarcity and crisis.
MM: Well, I think that label has a kind of useful identifying function for a reader who’s looking to think through questions of climate change, but I wonder if there’s also a certain distancing, as if this is fiction, which is apart from fiction about family or fiction about love. As you’ve pointed out, that’s simply not true. It felt very personal writing about this because my hometown, Kolkata, India—where I’ve set the book—is one of the cities in the world that is most vulnerable to climate change. It has already grown hotter and will be affected by sea level rise in the Bay of Bengal. It is predicted to endure more frequent and more severe storms in the coming 50 years or so. My parents live there, and my extended family lives there. What is this place going to become? It’s kind of frightening and sad and alarming to think about the future of this city. So in some ways, I’m glad for the label of climate fiction because it tells a reader there’s a category of books where one of the primary goals is to think about this future. But it is not apart from thinking about love and hope and community and morality and all of these things that so many other novels do as well.
MW: Both of your novels unfold with the momentum of a thriller. As a reader, you want to find out what happens; in A Burning, whether Jivan will be declared innocent, and here, whether Ma will recover the passports in time to leave for America. But unlike a conventional whodunnit or will-they-or-won’t-they narrative, the endings are left more unsettling and unresolved. How did you think about pacing in these novels?
MM: It gives me such a thrill to hear you say that it made you think in some ways of a thriller, because I love thinking about plot. I knew that I wanted A Guardian and a Thief to be set at the edge of something. I knew that it couldn’t be too long. I needed them to be on the cusp of a big change. I needed a moment where I could sustain the pressure of something going wrong. I love putting pressure on every word and every sentence to tell us something meaningful, and so I’m glad the pace worked for you.
I think a lot about the act of migrating because it has shaped my life so profoundly.
It’s funny because so much of the process of writing a book for the first however many years is about telling the story to myself, and figuring out the story for me, and then at some point, my perspective shifts. I start thinking about how do I invite a reader in? How do I guide a reader through this world? What do they need to move in the way that I want them to move through this world? I find thinking about the reader’s experience of the story really invigorating. It’s a really fun challenge to figure out how I can plant the questions that are meaningful and urgent to me in their mind as well.
MW: The precarity of reaching America and the idea of the “American Dream” loom over the novel. Your own immigration experience might be seen as embodying that idealized vision of the “American Dream”—you went to Harvard, became a successful editor and novelist, and now have a lovely family. But the novel repeatedly interrogates and complicates that idea, revealing its fragility and the challenges beneath the promise. If you’re comfortable, could you share how your personal experiences shaped your exploration of these themes and informed the ways the story questions the myths about America?
MW: You’re right. I moved to this country to go to college, and one of the things that the book grapples with is how moving away from home, and I think specifically, moving to this country, can be such a point of pride, such a thing of accomplishment, but also a wound that you bear for the rest of your life. You’ve torn yourself away from the place you know. How do you reconcile those two elements of being proud of the life you have here and also bearing sorrow for what you left behind?
Art is not activism.
I also wanted to think about that through the lens of class, which I’m very interested in. One of the families in the book is middle-class with plenty of resources, and they’re planning to move to the United States. The other main family is struggling to find a foothold in the city and does not have that level of resources. There are also secondary characters in the book who question that privilege; there’s a barber who runs a little shop on the sidewalk for whom it is unimaginable to move to another country. It’s a thing of great luck to be able to move away from where you were born at all. I moved in far more peaceful circumstances, but I think a lot about the act of migrating because it has shaped my life so profoundly.
MW: There’s a lovely moment where Dadu is rushing through town to buy food for his granddaughter, Mishti, when a street painter approaches him. At first, he wants to save his money for essentials, but then he pauses and reflects: “As a participant in the city he loved, it was up to him to insist on the value of a painter’s work—not the value of a famous painter’s work, the kind of work now being traded for rice and sugar—but the value of an unknown painter’s work. It was up to him to secure the meaning of the kind of work that exists not for investment potential but only for the eye’s momentary pleasure, only for the mind’s door to be left, for a small while, ajar. What was the value of that?”
I, probably like a lot of people, have been struggling with the role of art in our current political moment, whether it’s time to double down on its role in our lives or to focus on what might seem like more exigent concerns. How does this scene read to you now? How do you grapple with this balance?
MM: Art is not activism. Art has its own place, but I don’t think there can be any form of crisis where the value of art becomes diminished. Art is our mode of living with attention, right? Art is our mode of living with inquiry, living with curiosity, living with devotion to what’s around us, living with very close attention to elements of our lives which are not logistics or immediate needs and worries and questions. That mode of attentive living feels like an artist’s mode of living, and it feels vital for having a life that cannot be narrowed and cannot be squeezed dry of everything that makes it beautiful.
It’s not like a novel can feed anybody or provide anybody shelter or provide anybody money. In many ways, a novel is very impotent, and I recognize the limits of the novel. But I also want to think about how there is a more vast kind of life awaiting us if we do pay attention to fiction or painting or music or dance or any form of art as a mode of living—the wealth that it introduces to us, the way in which it allows us to access a deeper present beneath our own recognizable present. I think about that a lot: what can art do, and what can it definitely not do?