![]() ![]() ![]() A Fine Balance is as close to perfection as a novel gets. It’s so effortlessly Dickensian virtuosically exploring grand themes with poised and measured grace. Its four protagonists - Dina, in her forties, poor and widowed her two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Om (deemed ‘untouchable’ by the caste system) and Maneck, the son of an old School friend of Dina’s - are all victims of the times, whose sufferings are disparate, but equally devastating. This is an impassioned indictment of India’s corrupt and horrifically cruel society during India’s “State of Internal Emergency” of the 1970s. As with the almost Dickensian novel, the storyline has its elements of a cheerful comedy but, in the authors efforts to portray Mrs Gandhis regime in what he. I haven’t been haunted by a book like this since Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life but I’d say the scope and architecture of A Fine Balance is even more impressive. ![]() It is a timeless, masterful epic without question, one of my favourite novels of all time, so brilliantly gripping, I couldn’t put it down until its heartbreaking final pages. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is an extraordinary novel one of those books I’m ashamed I haven’t read sooner, but at the same time, am so glad I’ve read at a point in my life when I can truly appreciate its magnificence. ![]()
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