World Affairs Book Club: Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

This month’s selection is Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (Random House). Please read the book and join the discussion. 

This work explores the poverty found in Mumbai through a real and gripping narrative that follows three characters as they navigate the harsh economic realities of daily life. “[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

--Capitola Book Cafe