In ‘A Guardian and a Thief,’ a mother’s love for her family threatens her own morals

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

As 2025 comes to a close, we're revisiting interviews with this year's nominees and winners of some of the biggest prizes in literature. Megha Majumdar’s novel A Guardian and a Thief, a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, takes place in a near-future Kolkata struck by climate change. There, one family’s possibility of escape is put in jeopardy when their passports are stolen. In this conversation with Here & Now, Majumdar tells Jane Clayson that hope isn’t always noble in situations of crisis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's MPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong.
0:05.9	Megamajumdar's new book, A Guardian and a Thief, is about hope and love, but not in a squishy
0:11.8	polyana, hallmark card sort of way. Actually, the opposite. She's thinking about the scary,
0:17.5	dark, sometimes violent actions that hope and love can drive people to take.
0:23.1	Because she's not interested in moralizing, she's interested in the complex, in the human.
0:28.5	In this interview with here and now's Jane Clayson, Majumdar, goes into how her experiences
0:33.1	with deep love led her to thinking about its darker sides.
0:38.4	That's coming up.
0:46.7	The new novel, A Guardian and a Thief, is set in Kolkata, India, in the not-so-far-off future.
0:53.2	There is famine and floods and families resorting to desperate measures in order to survive.
0:56.4	One family of three, Ma, her elderly father, and her two-year-old daughter have a chance to escape. But a theft puts that chance in
1:02.8	jeopardy. The book weaves together Ma's story with the story of their burglar. A Guardian and a
1:09.5	thief is a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. It's also this month's Oprah Book Club selection. And author Meika Majumdar joins us from NPR, New York. Welcome and congratulations. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to have you. Well, this novel is set in a near-future version of
1:30.0	Calcutta, your actual hometown, which has been devastated by climate change. What was the
1:35.5	original spark for this story? Why this world and why now? As you said, I am from Kolkata. I spent
1:42.7	the first 19 years of my life there, and it is one of the cities in the world, which is most severely affected by climate change. It has grown hotter. It is predicted to endure more storms. And reading about that was heartbreaking. Imagine reading that kind of dire
2:03.4	prediction about your own hometown. It was a place of sorrow. And from that place of sorrow,
2:09.3	I started thinking about, well, what are love and hope and connection with your family and
2:17.4	connection with your community going to look
2:20.0	like in that kind of catastrophe.
2:22.9	The novel opens with this break-in that changes everything for this family.
2:28.4	Your central character, Ma, is days away from leaving India with her daughter to join her husband when this thief
	...

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