by Rohinton Mistry
Recommended by Our Book Club Members
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. In the upheavals of the State of Emergency, four strangers–a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village–will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
Click below to download the discussion guide.
About Book Club Members
Amnesty International Book Club membership just reached 7,000 this month. We are very excited about the growing number and the high level of engagement of our readers. Going on in 2019, we will be looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the books we read together. Please send us a photo, video, and other materials (feel free to be creative) of the book, yourself and/or your meeting group, along with your thoughts to bookclub@amnesty.ca. Your reviews will be shared with other members through our social media channels.
Our Reader’s Choice selection will be read for the months of November and December 2018 and was made possible by you, our book club members. With several hundred votes for 2018’s Readers’ Choice, A Fine Balance was the favourite pick from our readers. Thank you to all of you who suggested books and/or voted for your favourite ones! Read on to learn more.
About the Author
Rohinton Mistry
Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-Canadian author, whose best-known works include the novel ‘A Fine Balance’ and the short story ‘Swimming Lessons’, which has appeared in a number of collections. He was the 2012 recipient of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Rohinton Mistry moved to Canada in 1975, where he lived in Toronto and worked for a bank. Mistry eventually returned to university, finishing a degree in English and philosophy in 1984 at the University of Toronto. It was while he was a university student in Canada that he began to write and publish fiction.
Mistry’s fiction deploys a precise writing style and a sensitivity to the humour and horror of life to communicate deep compassion for human beings. His writing concerns people who try to find self-worth while dealing with painful family dynamics and difficult social and political constraints. His work also addresses immigration, especially immigration to Canada, and the difficulty immigrants face in a society that recognizes their cultural differences and yet cannot embrace those differences as being part of itself. (Vivian Zenari)
