Description

Behind a long concrete wall painted with cheerful Italianate tile advertisements that read BEAUTIFUL FOREVER, BEAUTIFUL FOREVER, lies Annawadi — a slum of three thousand people built on swampland next to the Mumbai international airport, in the shadow of luxury hotels.

Over three years, the American journalist Katherine Boo lived among Annawadi’s residents — translating, observing, recording — to write what is, by widespread consent, the finest piece of long-form reportage about contemporary India ever written by a foreign writer.

At the centre of her account are Abdul, the quiet teenage Muslim boy whose family fortune is built on the sorting of recyclable garbage; the ferocious Asha, who is climbing the slum’s political ladder one favour at a time; her clever daughter Manju, working toward becoming Annawadi’s first female college graduate; and the one-legged woman whose self-immolation will, in ways no one in Annawadi can yet see, change all of their lives.

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, *Behind the Beautiful Forevers* reads like a novel and reports like a court file. It is one of the most important books ever written about how the global poor actually live — and about how India’s promise of liberalisation looks from the side of the wall most of us drive past.

Indispensable.