A Burning

JIVAN
 
You smell like smoke, my mother said to me.
 
So I rubbed an oval of soap in my hair and poured a whole bucket of water on myself before a neighbor complained that I was wasting the morning supply.
 
There was a curfew that day. On the main street, a police jeep would creep by every half hour. Daily-wage laborers, compelled to work, would come home with arms raised to show they had no weapons.
 
In bed, my wet hair spread on the pillow, I picked up my new phone purchased with my own salary, screen guard still attached.
 
On Facebook, there was only one conversation.
 
These terrorists attacked the wrong neighborhood #KolabaganTrainAttack #Undefeated

Friends, if you have fifty rupees, skip your samosas today and donate to
 
The more I scrolled, the more Facebook unrolled.
 
This news clip exclusively from 24 Hours shows how
 
Candlelight vigil at

The night before, I had been at the railway station, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from my house. I ought to have seen the men who stole up to the open windows and threw flaming torches into the halted train. But all I saw were carriages, burning, their doors locked from the outside and dangerously hot. The fire spread to huts bordering the station, smoke filling the chests of those who lived there. More than a hundred people died. The government promised compensation to the families of the dead eighty thousand rupees! which, well, the government promises many things.
 
In a video, to the dozen microphones thrust at his chin, the chief minister was saying, Let the authorities investigate. Somebody had spliced this comment with a video of policemen scratching their heads. It made me laugh.
 
I admired these strangers on Facebook who said anything they wanted to. They were not afraid of making jokes. Whether it was about the police or the ministers, they had their fun, and wasn t that freedom? I hoped that after a few more

Megha Majumdar

WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD A New York Times Notable Book National Book Award Nominee One of the Guardian's Best Books of the Year National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award Nominee American Library Accociation Andrew Carnegie Medal Finalist 

"Riveting. . . . Fate has rarely been so many-faced, so muscular, so mercurial, or so mesmerizing as it is in A Burning."
The New York Times Book Review (cover)

"Powerful... propulsive...This is a book to relish for its details, for the caress of the writer s gaze against the world... The interplay of choice and circumstance has always been the playing field of great fiction, and on this terrain, a powerful new writer stakes her claim."
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

Majumdar demonstrates an uncanny ability to capture the vast scope of a tumultuous society by attending to the hopes and fears of people living on the margins. The effect is transporting.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Immersive. . . . Masterly. . . . the elements of a thriller are transmuted into prismatic portraiture. . . . Her spare plot moves with arrowlike determination."
James Wood, The New Yorker

A Burning lays bare the urgent need for a justice system that upholds its ideals, elegantly excoriating a world where corruption and inequity rot the lives of those wrongly viewed as disposable. In blistering, beautiful prose, Majumdar illuminates the dark truths of the modern world, while also celebrating the burning deep in the hearts of strivers everywhere.  
Esquire

In her captivating debut novel A Burning, Megha Majumdar presents a powerful corrective to the political narratives that have dominated in contemporary India.
Time

A story you ll want to read in just one sitting. . . . A thrilling and complex tale.  
CNN

A scorching and intimate look at those who find themselves