Review

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar review – survival in a climate-ravaged Kolkata 

This article is more than 1 month old

This moral thriller offers a perceptive account of specifically Indian anxieties

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Keshava Guha

Mon 26 Jan 2026 

The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is not asked to take sides, but instead to observe how the world makes thieves of guardians, and vice versa.