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Title: Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Subtitle: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Author: Katherine Boo
Narrator: Sunil Malhotra
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
Language: English
Release date: 08-01-13
Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 16 votes
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
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 - Annawadis "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.
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)
Members Reviews:
Exceptional translation of astounding research
Where does Behind the Beautiful Forevers rank among all the audiobooks youve listened to so far?
Highly rated but have listened to many exceptional books
What did you like best about this story?
Understanding what survival means in a Mumbai slum AND Katherine Boo's note at the end that contextualises so much.
Which character as performed by Sunil Malhotra was your favorite?
Abdul - who kept wanting a life that meant more
Impossible to forget
My first listen of Behind the Beautiful Forevers was from my local library. Once I'd read it, I read it through a second time immediately & then I bought my own copy here. Although I will never forget this story it is so compelling & so beautifully told I know I will read it many more times.
I hadn't read the description of this book when I first picked it up - I completed the book & it was only when I got to the epilogue that I discovered it was non-fiction. The narrative reads like a beautiful fiction but the story is true.
