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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity cover

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo

3

awards won

40

score

#7 of 3,809 books · #1 in General

Won the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction (2013), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest (2012). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 3 other awards.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers won the National Book Award, was a New York Times bestseller, and was named one of Time's ten best nonfiction books of the decade and one of the New York Times's 100 best books of the 21st century. In this 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 Annawaldi 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.

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Publisher
Random House
ISBN-13
9780679643951
Topics
Poverty and inequalityUrban life in IndiaGlobalization

Other awarded books from Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

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