Name: A Fine Balance
ISBN: 9781400030651

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A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry

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With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificant novel caputures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the cast violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As the cahracters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love. "A Fine Balance" creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Book Details

Publisher: Vintage
Publish Date: Nov 30th, 2001
Pages: 624
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.10in - 5.20in - 1.30in - 0.98lb
EAN: 9781400030651
Categories: • Literary• Historical - General• Sagas

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About the Author

Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay and now lives near Toronto. His first novel, Such a Long Journey, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and received, among other awards, the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book of the Year. A Fine Balance is his second novel, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize as well as a Booker Prize finalist. Mistry is also the author of Swimming Lessons, a collection of short stories.

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What people are saying

Vanity Fair

1 year

"Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is the kind of book that stops time. You enter another world, live a full life span, and return to find that it’s only Tuesday!"

– Abraham Verghese is an author.

vanityfair.com

Oprah Winfrey Network

14 years

"I've never encountered pages that took me so far, and removed me from my own way of life and way of thinking the way A Fine Balance did."

– Oprah Winfrey is a talk-show host, author, and philanthropist.

Alexander Chee is a writer.

@PBW_Poet Off the top of my head: Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital; Villette, by Charlotte Brontë; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. I'm sure there's others.

twitter.com

Praise for this book

"Astonishing. . . . A rich and varied spectacle, full of wisdom and laughter and the touches of the unexpectedly familiar through which literature illuminates life." --Wall Street Journal

"A serious and important work . . . the product of high intelligence and passionate conviction." --New York Review of Books

"Monumental. . . . Few have caught the real sorrow and inexplicable strength of India, the unaccountable crookedness and sweetness, as well as Mistry." --Pico Iyer, Time

"Those who continue to harp on the decline of the novel . . . ought to consider Rohinton Mistry. He needs no infusion of magic realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is magical." --The New York Times