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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo
Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity
Random House
February 2012
On Sale: February 7, 2012
288 pages
ISBN: 1400067553
EAN: 9781400067558
Kindle: B006GHXB2A
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work
of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and
sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a
better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great,
unequal cities. In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three
years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of
global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury
hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to
prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a
reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune
beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer
people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep
scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an
alternate route to the middle class: political corruption.
With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful
daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become
its first female college graduate. And even the poorest
Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal
thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives
and good times they call “the full enjoy.” But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a
shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the
city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex,
power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest
individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths,
the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so,
too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of
Annawadi. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what
connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous
change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the
reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s
hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to
forget.
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