When the heat index breaks language and food vanishes from markets, what does “good” even mean? A Guardian and a Thief solves the problem of moral clarity in disaster by making you feel the cost of every choice. You don’t just read about climate crisis—you sweat through it.
A Guardian and a Thief shows how two families in a near-future Kolkata collide over one theft and discover that, in a collapsing world, “guardian” and “thief” are roles we pass between us, not labels we own.
A Guardian and a Thiefroots its drama in specific, textured scenes of scarcity (markets emptied by heat and pests; a U.S. consulate rationing “climate visas”), and critics have highlighted its visceral realism and moral force; it’s been reviewed by Kirkus (release Oct. 14, 2025), The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, and recognized as a National Book Award finalist and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, with author interviews and publisher pages confirming publication details and themes.
A Guardian and a Thief is best for readers of literary “climate fiction,” moral thrillers, Kolkata novels, and anyone who loved A Burning. Not for readers seeking plot-by-gadget dystopia or tidy endings; Majumdar deals in entanglements, not escape hatches.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
A Guardian and a Thief is Megha Majumdar’s second novel, following her bestselling debut A Burning; the new book is set in a famine-struck, flood-prone near-future Kolkata and was released in 2025 by Scribner/Knopf imprints across markets, earning a spot as a National Book Award finalist and an Oprah pick.
What struck me first was how the novel opens like a fever: the city itself hums, groans, and withholds. Within pages, you feel the heat as a force that rearranges human habits—markets vanish, water is rationed, and bureaucracy grows teeth. Majumdar’s precision with ordinary objects (a towel on an overheated doorknob, a handkerchief that holds cold) transforms scarcity into scene.
I underline “scene,” because the novel never lectures; it shows.
And it shows from the first page: Ma cooking eggs and rice in a city where “the heat [is] a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head,” while her mind catalogs stolen shelter food and the rumor of a thief on a bicycle.
A Guardian and a Thief hinges on a single, devastating act—passports vanish.
Without those documents, Ma, her father Dadu, and her toddler Mishti cannot board their flight to safety, and the U.S. consulate proves more parchment than mercy, invoking rules and “notes in the system” as the line outside faints in the heat. As the family chases the thief through Kolkata’s lanes, shelters, and small businesses, the story widens into a moral field study: who owes what to whom when the planet’s bill comes due?
Meanwhile, the “thief,” a young man called Boomba, becomes more than a culprit; he is a son, a brother, a strategist, hiding in the rafters of another person’s house because hiding is how you live long enough to love anyone.
The novel’s plot is urgent, but its torque comes from Majumdar’s attention to textures—humidity on skin, the sheen of a Scooby-Doo T-shirt on a grainy camera, and the compromised cool of a soaked, hexagon-stamped handkerchief.
This is climate fiction without the neon—slow, plausible, and local.
2. Background
The historical undertow matters, and Majumdar braids it in explicitly: Bengal’s past famines, colonial extraction, and the cycles of drought and flood are invoked to remind us that catastrophe in this region is not aberration but recurrence.
A Guardian and a Thief’s “climate visas” riff on present debates about movement and responsibility, and reviews have rightly emphasized how power tracks along borders, files, and the moods of officers. Publication context: 2025 saw the novel land with high visibility—Kirkus flagged its “electrifying depiction,” The Washington Post praised its anxiety-inducing realism, and Foreign Policy read it as a ledger of how the have-nots get by.
Add Oprah’s selection and NBA recognition, and you have a literary conversation-piece that’s also a street-level story.
I want to note how convincingly Majumdar renders the “consulate state.”
The book’s consular scenes capture a chilling rule—“once I make a note, the visa is canceled,” a policy voice that feels both banal and absolute.
On Day 1, Ma cooks in a city of “shortage,” while markets stand as empty lots of onion peel and dust where cows used to nose for scraps. The family queues at the American window; a guard reads Asterix & Obelix and takes a bribe; an officer cites the system; a young man faints; a towel is wrapped around an overheated doorknob. Later, a neighbor’s security camera reveals the thief—and a toddler, shrewder than the adults, spots the Scooby-Doo logo that will become a breadcrumb trail.
At a small shop, a father and daughter recount how their clothesline was raided, and a “hexagon” on a dropped handkerchief points toward a billionaire’s cooling textiles, philanthropy, and PR feast. In these vignettes, climate capitalism meets neighborhood gossip, and the book’s larger argument clicks: the new world order runs through small errands and shared rumors.
Critics have underscored this texture—the book is “compelling” because it is concrete. The research isn’t lab-coated; it’s lived.
This is why the story persuades.
3. A Guardian and a Thief Summary
The novel opens in a near-future Kolkata (Calcutta) sweltering under lethal heat and resource scarcity. Three generations share a modest home: Ma (a practical, exhausted mother), Dadu (her aging father, a onetime teacher and letter-to-the-editor “writer”), and two-year-old Mishti.
Ma’s husband (Mishti’s father) has already left for the United States on a “climate visa,” a humanitarian pathway opened by America as parts of South Asia sink into unlivable heat and floods. Ma, Dadu, and Mishti have finally secured their own visas and, after the sacred pageantry of the consulate handover—“a woman with blond hair… handed them their passports” and Dadu breathes easier seeing the precious “multiple” entries stamp—they step out of the palace-like consulate elated and trembling at the life about to begin across the world .
That night a thief slips through the dark and, as captured later on a neighbor’s CCTV, lopes down the lane carrying Ma’s purse; he’s “skinny” and alone, and the family’s sense of safety collapses as childhood fears become present tense . The purse held the freshly issued passports and visas. Overnight, their future evaporates.
The next morning begins an exhausting waltz through India’s low-grade bureaucratic chaos. At the U.S. consulate, a blond officer—boxed behind bulletproof glass and rules—insists that “if your visa is stolen, we are to make a note in the system, and you are to reapply,” and worse, “once I make a note, the visa is canceled” even if the passports are later recovered .
Dadu tries a bluff to avoid the cancellation—“I’m a writer… people know me”—and Ma plays along about “journalist friends,” just enough to make the officer consider the optics of canceling a climate visa for an elderly “writer” and a preschooler. The officer relents only insofar as to not update the system since the family was not on the day’s appointment rolls: “If you find your passports, fine. If you don’t, you can’t get on the plane anyway” .
From here, the novel splits and braids two quests. In one thread, Ma and Dadu undertake a desperate, shoe-leather investigation to find the thief before the flight date. In the other, we begin to inhabit the thief’s life.
Ma’s chase. After the consulate rebuff and a grim police station exchange (“You people don’t guard your own things,” the officer says, snarling that he’s dealing with “fifty assaults per day”), Ma bribes a guard to re-enter the consulate queue, a small moral bruise that underscores how “some things cost a lot.
That was how it was” . Back home, a tech-savvy neighbor, Mrs. Sen—their upstairs landlady with two parrots named Abba and Bee Gees—helps enlarge the CCTV stills. The breakthrough comes from Mishti herself, who points at the screen and yells, “Scooby-Doo!”—the thief is wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt .
Armed with the printed still, Ma and Dadu trudge through rain and relentless heat, asking vendors, the ironing man, and shopkeepers whether anyone recognizes the shirt or the boy.
A roadside fruit seller remembers a chase: a thief tore through his stall, “long gone,” but he dropped a “handkerchief… embroidered… with a hexagon,” the trademark of a philanthropic billionaire’s riverine compound known simply as “the hexagon,” which had recently donated cooling cloths to shelters. Ma instantly deduces the thief has been, or is, a resident of a nearby shelter, tightening her search radius .
Along the way, Ma also contemplates a nuclear option: forged documents. In a quietly harrowing scene, a back-alley fixer lays out “passports with visas” that “scan like the real things” and boasts of contacts at “the consulate… the passport office.” He accepts payment only in gold and claims he can deliver in “forty-eight hours,” a deadline aligned with the family’s flight.
The way he explains the data “pipe” connecting systems (“it’s a complicated pipe”) hints at corruption that could make forgeries pass, but Ma balks at the risk, cost, and residual fear of being caught at an airport with a child in tow .
The thief’s backstory. The thief is Boomba, a village boy from the Sunderbans whose childhood was mangled by climate-driven poverty: his fisherman father injured, his mother’s crab-harvesting gig halted by NGO projects, and Boomba himself shouldering care of his baby brother, Robi, until a cooking mishap set their hut ablaze—an accident that left them homeless and broke .
Restless and gutted by shame, Boomba left for the city at eighteen with a schoolbag and a magnetic snakes-and-ladders board, promising to earn enough to bring his family up later.
Life in Kolkata is precarious: he rows small boats for a living, sleeps “under the awning of a stationery shop,” and eats charity kitchen rations. Over a year he scrapes together enough to rent a single cramped room and even buys a portable AC unit because he dreams of Robi sleeping cool, unbitten by malaria-bearing mosquitoes; every rupee is a seed planted toward family reunification .
Fate knits him to Ma’s path at the hexagon, a floating architectural marvel/wedding venue/PR project built by a tech billionaire along the river. The billionaire’s “cooling cloth” handkerchiefs (the one Boomba dropped) and public “feast” for anyone with a child draw Ma, Mishti, and Boomba into the same orbit.
Inside the hexagon’s surreal abundance, Boomba, who has quietly shepherded Mishti around with real tenderness—peeling lychees for her, patting her back when she chokes—gets swept into a stampede when Shanto and other poor guests breach the inner compound.
What begins as raiding the pantries (“whole ilish fish,” “gulab jamun adorned with gold leaf”) escalates to wholesale looting of “office… library… garage… movie theater… spa,” and Boomba pockets a tiny jeweled globe and a sack of rice as thousands seize the moment to take what the city never gave them .
The hexagon riot ricochets through the plot. For Boomba, it yields a talismanic globe—childhood wonder made mineral, “lapis lazuli oceans” with “diamonds and emeralds and rubies” for countries—that he later uses like a weapon and a prize .
For Ma and the city, it becomes a political cudgel in America’s hands: within days, anti-immigrant anger hardens, and flights carrying “climate immigrants” are paused.
Before that consequence hits, however, Ma chooses the straightest line: find Boomba, retrieve the passports, and fly.
Her search narrows to the neighborhood shelter and nearby lanes, and she nearly confronts him; he’s beaten away once by Dadu (who still believes the city “will return the passports” if he stays upright and hopeful), then slinks into Mrs. Sen’s house through an open window and hides for days in a closet “full of sweaters,” a little urban fairy tale of a boy folded into a wealthy woman’s unused winter things while her parrots squawk about the intrusion .
On the eve of Ma’s scheduled departure, two major turns arrive.
Turn one: the airport. Ma leaves for the airport with Mishti (after telling her, tautly, “Dadu will come later!”), passes an initial passport glance at the gate, and believes the journey has begun. Then she sees the departures board mob and understands: their flight is canceled, the next day’s flight canceled, and “there would be no more flights to America for… the foreseeable future.”
Protests in the U.S. (stoked by televised images of the hexagon looting) have coerced a moratorium on climate-visa flights despite counter-protests reminding leaders that applicants are carefully vetted. For Ma and Mishti, that geopolitics condenses into the simple fact of going nowhere: she extracts a meaningless promise of rebooking and wheels a luggage trolley back toward a life she’d already packed away .
Turn two: the house. Returning from the airport, Ma notices a shimmer at her kitchen window—“a figure… shadows behind the glass.” She knows “what ought to be visible” and what shouldn’t. Boomba is back inside her house.
She parks the suitcases, walks Mishti to Mrs. Sen’s parrots, and steadies herself for a confrontation. “Now she understood that the house was a battlefield, and she was a warrior,” she thinks, ready to “talk to someone” before they enter, and we feel the book’s title condense in the doorway: guardian and thief, eyeing the same shelter, each protecting a child in a collapsing city .
In the closing movement, the narrative toggles between Ma outside and Boomba inside. Convinced that Ma has moved out for good—having watched mother and child depart for the airport—Boomba has smashed a ground-floor window (with that jeweled globe when he had nothing weighty like a pressure cooker left) and cleared Ma’s defensive barricade of cups and plates from the sills.
He turns on the TV for the illusion of life, tries on a shirt from the wardrobe, fills water buckets, and places his globe and snakes-and-ladders board on the dining table “awaiting players and admirers” .
Then his family arrives from the village.
The reunion is saturated with small, aching details: Robi climbs the stairs “gripping the banister with one hand like an old man,” touches the wall in wonder, spins the jeweled globe and asks if it’s “for me?”; Boomba’s father paces, reborn by the house’s imagined power—“There was no other man but he who was his son’s true father”—and his mother dreams of converting the ornamental garden to grow okra and eggplant to feed neighbors.
Even here, desire divides: Boomba resists his mother’s ambition to turn home into community project; all he wants is a safe, ordinary life for the four of them after years of heat, hunger, and humiliation .
Majumdar knits these strands toward a tight, ambiguous final tableau. On one side of the wall: Ma, a mother whose flight has been canceled by forces far away, who has already lost a phone to a pickpocket and now faces the theft of her home, steeling herself to reclaim the place where her child sleeps.
On the other side: Boomba, whose years of guardianship for Robi (and, fleetingly, for Mishti at the hexagon feast) have hardened his belief that moral duty runs first and finally to one’s family. The novel has prepared us to see both truths at once. At the hexagon, he wasn’t a monster; he fed Mishti, “patted her back,” and made sure she drank water. “All Boomba was,” the narrator insists, “was a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family” .
The ending—what happens, and what it means. The literal last pages don’t stage a dramatic showdown with police sirens or blood, and there is no miracle flight that whisks Ma and Mishti to Michigan (in Mishti’s vocabulary, “Mitchigun”) that night. Instead, two parallel outcomes crystallize:
- America shuts its door—for now. The family’s climate-visa journey is frozen by U.S. domestic politics after the televised hexagon looting, despite advocates reminding everyone that applicants are fingerprinted, eye-scanned, and deeply vetted. Ma’s rebooking “promise” reads as theater; the text pointedly projects “no flight… until the American elections, three and a half years in the future” .
- The house becomes the battleground. Ma returns from the airport to find signs of occupation; Boomba, believing the house abandoned, has installed his family, his globe, his hope. We leave Ma poised to act (“a warrior”), and Boomba—and Robi—inside the cool, lit rooms of someone else’s future, recast as their present .
The title’s doubleness resolves here: guardian (Ma, also Dadu; and, in his way, Boomba) and thief (Boomba, and—depending on your lens—the rich, the state, the consulate’s rules).
In a city where a consular “note in the system” can cancel a life, where forged visas can be bought with gold bangles, and where a cooling cloth carries the brand of a billionaire, the novel asks what theft means. Is Boomba’s break-in worse than the structural theft that renders the poor disposable and the honest powerless? Or, as with the hexagon raid, is seizure sometimes survival?
Loose ends clarified.
- Dadu. Before the airport dash, he’s faltering but stubbornly hopeful, clinging to the belief the “benevolent city” will return the passports. Through the final stretch he’s absent from the airport scenes; Ma’s curt “Dadu will come later!” to Mishti reads both as hope and resignation, another string the city cuts .
- The Scooby-Doo clue. It jump-starts the field search and ties Mishti’s world to the adult stakes; noticing it is one of the most quietly devastating uses of a child’s perception in the book .
- The forged-documents thread. It remains a road not taken. The fixer’s “complicated pipe” metaphor confirms that fraud can tunnel through “systems,” but Ma refuses to hinge her child’s safety on a lie that could implode at any airport scanner .
- The hexagon riot. It’s not a random spectacle; it is the catalytic incident U.S. hawks cite to freeze climate migration, ensuring that Ma’s lawful path is choked off while Boomba’s illegal path (into Ma’s home) is perversely the only one that “works” in the short term .
If you zoom out, the book’s plot machinery is elegant: the stolen passports force Ma into the city and into contact with the hexagon; the hexagon’s riot scuttles her flight; that canceled flight returns her to a home already occupied by the very boy whose need for a safe room is the mirror of her own. Each thread pulls the others taut.
Why the ending feels right for this world. The story refuses a sentimental swap (Boomba repents and returns the documents in time; Ma’s family makes the flight; everyone is safe) because the world Majumdar has built is one where systems—consulates, airports, billionaire philanthropy, police, even weather—are the real protagonists.
In such a world, Ma and Boomba are both right and both wrong: she’s the rightful occupant fending for a toddler; he’s a good son and brother whose life has never offered a legal, dignified route to shelter.
The final image—Ma recognizing the shimmer of someone moving in her kitchen, squaring her shoulders—keeps both moral claims alive and lets the reader sit in that heat a moment longer .
4. A Guardian and a Thief Analysis
4.1 A Guardian and a Thief Characters
Majumdar builds her people from needs that feel painfully reasonable: Ma wants her child to leave; Dadu wants dignity; Boomba wants to feed the family he will summon; Mrs. Sen wants her quiet house and her parrots.
Ma is practical to the point of danger—she bribes a guard, calculates when to keep a cooling cloth for Mishti, and interrogates a forger who demands payment in gold, a detail that reads like parable. Dadu is the book’s most piercing conscience and a plausible fabulist; before a glacial officer, he declares, “I’m a writer,” tugging at the only soft lever he can imagine. Boomba, nicknamed in love and worn down by heat, is the character who flips the title’s lens: his survival strategies are, to him, forms of guardianship.
I believed them because their micro-decisions felt borrowed from life.
And here the book hands us its thesis scene: the consulate’s “note in the system” will cancel hope, a fact Dadu tries to bargain past with his voice and the presence of a fidgeting toddler, and the officer hesitates—momentarily—at the optics of erasing “climate visas” for an elderly writer and a preschooler.
Mrs. Sen, with security cameras that grow pixelated when needed most, functions as a chorus on Kolkata’s frustrated middle-class—“These cameras are no good when you need them.” A minor figure, the ironing man, mutters a whole history of normalization: “One shortage, another shortage, another shortage,” a cadence that teaches us how to keep going when everything asks you to stop.
Even the forger speaks in metaphors (“Imagine… a pipe”), and by the time he asks for “only gold,” the novel has taught you to expect the economy to re-metal itself. Then there’s Mishti, who sees Scooby-Doo where adults see blur—her finger on the screen is the book’s sly joke about detective fiction and the undervalued perceptiveness of children.
Across them all, what emerges is a network of micro-guardians and micro-thieves, shuttling between roles as the day’s hunger dictates.
Character is argument here, and the argument is that goodness measured in full bellies is different from goodness measured in forms.
The novel lets you pass the scale across your own life.
That’s why the people linger.
4.2 Themes and Symbolism
The book runs on themes of guardianship, theft, and the bureaucratic imagination—how a stamp can move a family as surely as a flood.
Three quick lenses: (1) Climate scarcity recasts petty crime as policy failure; when a handkerchief with a billionaire’s hexagon cools bodies, charity becomes branding. (2) Surveillance promises justice but delivers pixels—Mrs. Sen’s cameras can’t read a face, only a T-shirt. (3) Borders become algorithms; a “note in the system” is the modern gate, unseen but absolute.
The hexagon shows up as a neat geometry for comfort purchased at scale.
Majumdar structures the novel as a countdown (seven days to departure), so the city’s meteorology and the family’s errand list tick at the same pace.
Scenes at the shelter—formerly a post office, now a lifeboat—literalize the remailing of the social contract: “We don’t have enough space, baba… Take a ticket and wait.” Doors, curtains, and glass recur, culminating in the consulate window—clear but impenetrable, mercy filtered through bulletproof panes.
I also read the parrots—noisy, hungry, intrusive—as a chorus for the city’s unshut mouths, the way need talks even when we sleep.
And, quietly, the book suggests how stories work as documents; Dadu’s “I’m a writer” is not bragging but a last-ditch visa application.
In a lesser novel, these would feel schematic.
Here they feel observed.
One to end the section: heat doesn’t symbolize; it presses.
5. Evaluation
Strengths / pleasant surprises
I loved how the novel refuses melodrama yet keeps your stomach in your throat.
The prose is exact and sensuous (Ma’s “goosebutts,” the towel on the hot knob), and the pacing—tight chapters, spare dialogue—keeps you walking, sweating, bargaining alongside the characters. The moral ambiguity is also a strength; by giving Boomba chapter-space and letting him hide in Mrs. Sen’s closet among winter sweaters, the book lets us feel how survival borrows.
And while big-picture climate is the premise, the book is small-picture human—snacks shared in a queue, a child’s shout at a cartoon logo.
If you come for techno-solutions, you’ll be frustrated. If you come for people, you’ll be fed.
Weakness: two or three side characters deliver exposition that edges toward speechifying (the forger’s “pipe” monologue skates the line).
A subplot about “climate visas” could feel convenient to readers unaware that such policy talk already shadows reality in think-tank proposals and journalistic speculation.
Impact: personally, the book left me less interested in judging the thief than in auditing the conditions that make theft rational.
I kept returning to the toddler’s discoverer’s gaze—how often have we missed the clue right on the screen because we were “doing some work”?
The neighbor who says, “One shortage, another shortage,” tuned my ear to how normalization works; I now notice how quickly we call something “the new normal” to protect ourselves from grief. And the consulate window—how many times have we wished the system were a person so we could plead at a throat rather than a screen?
Few novels change how I move through a city; this one did, by restoring stakes to errand-length distances.
Comparison: readers of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song or Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea will recognize the slow suffocation of civic systems and the moral claustrophobia of family protection. Reviewers have made the same lineage explicit.
6. Personal Insight
We talk about “climate literacy” in classrooms, but students rarely get a felt model of administrative power; this book can be taught alongside policy articles on climate migration, visas, and urban heat mortality to show how systems meet skin.
Pair A Guardian and a Thief with a primer on urban heat islands and migration ethics; discuss how a “note in the system” becomes a proxy for morality when institutions underheat or overheat.
Read the Kirkus and Washington Post pieces together to study how reviewers translate texture into argument, and add Foreign Policy for a policy-adjacent critique of class and survival.
For author background and publication context, consult the official site and Simon & Schuster/UK pages; for conversation-level zeitgeist, see the LA Times Book Club note and Oprah coverage in Indian media.
7. A Guardian and a Thief Quotes
“The heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.”
“There was—in the label accepted by the region—a shortage.”
“Once I make a note, the visa is canceled.”
“One shortage, another shortage, another shortage.”
“Scooby-Doo! … the thief was wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt.”
“The hexagon… all kinds of cooling product ideas.”
“We don’t have enough space, baba… Take a ticket and wait.”
“I’m a writer… I will ask around and find the passports.”
8. Conclusion
If your appetite is for page-turning moral fiction that breathes street-level air, A Guardian and a Thief belongs at the front of your queue.
It is, yes, “climate fiction,” but it is really family fiction under climate, where love must choose between formal good and felt good.
It is also a Kolkata novel that respects the city’s density of voices and its brutal weather—older histories of famine laid against a future that looks, unnervingly, like Tuesday.
And it’s a document novel: passports, tickets, ledgers, appointment letters—papers that decide who eats, flies, hides, or hopes.
Give this to readers who liked A Burning, Paul Lynch, Chang-rae Lee, and editorial-window stories where a pane of glass is a whole regime.
I finished the book and felt less sure who was “guardian” and who was “thief,” which is exactly the point.