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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Written by: Katherine Boo
Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
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About this listen

National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2012

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 15-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.

©2012 Katherine Boo (P)2013 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Asia India Poverty & Homelessness Social Sciences Sociology South Asia Urban

Critic Reviews

"[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter…. Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted." (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
"The book plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel…. Boo gives even the broadest themes (the collateral damage of globalization, say) a human face. And there are half a dozen characters here so indelible - so swept up in impossible dreams and schemes - that they call Dickens and Austen to mind." ( Entertainment Weekly)
"Must read. Katherine Boo Behind the Beautiful Forevers. A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty." (Salman Rushdie)
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Katherine Boo provides a perspective for the questioning mind on ‘what can be done to address the jinx of cycle of poverty in cities and the ever growing slum population. I found it interesting. Having lived in the city and travelled through those slums(you stay in the city: you have to pass through) I can relate to the locales, the court acts and the picture of apathy all prevailing at the hospitals. The incredible greed of those in authority to strip whatever left of the poor is graphically portrayed. With some of my own encounters in my professional experience I can vouch for its possibilities.
The grit shown by some in the slums to dream and the few, either through NGO or as individuals, who try to do good even under such adverse circumstances reflects the true human spirit. I am sure it is found everywhere but it is thriving in India. A good book. Wish I could have listened to the story in the local dialect.

A true story well told.

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Loved every line of this book. As a documentarian I would use this book as a guide to all my future works. Creative nonfiction is a niche genre and Boo is probably the best at it. I would love to inhabit her mind and her heart to understand how to do this kind of work.

heartbreaking and inspiring.

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