Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo
A Mumbai slum in the shadow of luxury hotels. Three years inside.
For you if
you want to understand what daily life in an Indian slum actually looks like from inside it rather than from outside it
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Annawadi is a slum beside the Mumbai airport — a settlement of 3,000 people living in the shadow of luxury hotels that were built on the land they once occupied. Boo spent three years there, learning Marathi, attending court hearings, following families through the justice system, the garbage economy, the aspirations and catastrophes of daily life. The most immersive visitor dispatch from inside Indian urban poverty ever published. Pulitzer Prize winner. The dispatch that refuses to reduce its subjects to their poverty — each person has ambitions, relationships, humor, rage — while also refusing to pretend the poverty is incidental.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- India • South Asia
- Voice
- An outside perspective on India
- Themes
- inequalityurban poverty
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Capernaum(2018)
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Why it’s here: Cast almost entirely with non-professional actors living some version of the story on screen — a 12-year-old's lawsuit against his own parents is the frame, but the real indictment is everything that made the lawsuit make sense to him.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
