Oprah Winfrey called Megha Majumdar one of her favorite authors ever as she named the novel “A Guardian and a Thief” as her October book club pick on Tuesday, telling “CBS Mornings” that she’s “never read a book quite like this.”
Majumdar said she was shocked to get a call from Winfrey, informing her the novel made her book club. It was a pinch yourself moment.
“It’s why I didn’t believe it because it was completely outside the context of my life,” Majumdar told “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King.
Winfrey said she chose the book because it surprised her, “The way you perceive the story changes in the middle of the story.”
“A Guardian and a Thief” is set in Majumdar’s hometown of Kolkata, India, following two families each seeking to protect their own children in the midst of a food shortage and extreme climate change. They find that the love they have for their kids brings them into conflict with each other. One of the characters is trying to get to America.
“I wanted to think about what hope and love will look like in a time of climate crisis. What will it mean to love our children with ferocity and vigor in a time of scarcity and what will happen when our love for our children clashes with the love that we have for our neighbors, our community, when our individual acts of hope come up against collective acts of hope,” Majumdar explained.
In these exclusive web extras, Majumdar reads passages from her latest novel.
Read free excerpts below
From the storeroom hidden under the stairs, Ma fetched a cup of rice and a sack of eggs speckled gray like the moon, then cooked, standing before the stove’s blue fire, her eye upon the window and its dusk, in which bats swooped and the neem tree shivered and a figure down on the road pedaled a bicycle, whistling, as if everything was all right.
Thief, thought Ma. Who else but a person who had chanced upon fresh vegetables or fruit would wander the city of Kolkata in this ruined year, the heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head, and recall a song? She watched to see what the thief would do. He pedaled past. But Ma saw a different reality shimmer into being, in which he leaned his bicycle against the wall, climbed the pipes, like a toddy tapper, and appeared at her window. In that picture, the thief was a collector of local information, dutiful and his neighborhood eavesdropping, shrewd in following what he heard about the bins of onions and carrots, the sacks of lentils and rice, the bags of raisins and cashews hidden in the dark fist of the house, stolen by Ma from donations made to the shelter where she worked, while the city outside wept for a handful of something to eat.
It was her duty, as a guardian to put into action the beautiful ideal of hope. Ma thought harshly: This was what it looked like. Hope for the future was no shy bloom, but a blood- maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present. Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived.
