Behind the beautiful forevers - Katherine Boo

In this brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi's "most-everything girl," might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds-and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.


Winner of the National Book Award | The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award | The Los Angeles Times Book Prize | The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award | The New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times
The Washington Post
O: The Oprah Magazine
USA Today
New York
The Miami Herald
San Francisco Chronicle
Newsday

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New Yorker
People
Entertainment Weekly
The Wall Street Journal
The Boston Globe
The Economist
Financial Times
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
Foreign Policy
The Seattle Times
The Nation
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Denver Post
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Salon
The Plain Dealer
The Week
Kansas City Star
Slate
Time Out New York
Publishers Weekly

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER


"A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking."-Junot Daz, The New York Times Book Review

"Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years."-New York

"This book is both a tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece."-Judges' Citation for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award


"[A] landmark book."-The Wall Street Journal

"A triumph of a book."-Amartya Sen


"There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them."-Adrian Nicole LeBlanc


"[A] stunning piece of narrative nonfiction . . . [Katherine] Boo's prose is electric."-O: The Oprah Magazine

"Inspiring, and irresistible . . . Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care."-People