Katherine Boo, a staff writer at the New Yorker, spent more than three years living with the residents of Annawadi, a slum close to Mumbai airport. In Behind the Beautiful Forevers she distils hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of official documents into one of the most extraordinary pieces of reportage ever written. Boo absents herself entirely from the narrative, whose central thread concerns a bizarre act of self-destructive revenge, and allows the slum-dwellers to speak in their own voices. 'Astonishing', wrote Neel Mukherjee in the Times. 'One's first reaction is disbelief, followed by stunned silence. Boo is unsentimental, unjudgmental, uncondescending, yet brimful of compassion.'

Granta | paperback |ISBN: 9781846274510