A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf) ~Janet Brown

Ma has won the Third World jackpot. Her husband has a research position in the States that enables him to send for his family and she, her father, and her little girl have just picked up their passports, each stamped with visas to the "country of encompassing hope." The three of them have plane tickets that will, within a week, take them away from Kolkata where heat is "a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one's head," 

Farmers have died, street markets have vanished, while people "wept for a handful of something to eat." Ma and her family aren't weeping. She's pilfered food from the emergency shelter where she recently worked, enough to last until the day she leaves this stricken city forever with her family. 

At nightfall on the day they've received their visas from the American consulate, a boy from the shelter breaks into their house while the family sleeps. He has seen Ma laden with spoils from the shelter's store of food and he feels no compunction about stealing her stolen goods. On his way out, laden with bags that will keep him alive, he grabs Ma's purse and steals her future. When he discovers the passports inside the handbag, he has no idea of what they are and tosses them into a mound of garbage. 

The tragedy of this is diluted immediately as the boy's history becomes part of the narrative. Boomba has struggled to save his own family, as much as Ma has committed thefts to safeguard her own. His own attempts to bring his family out of rural poverty have been dashed by thieves and his efforts have been no less heroic than Ma’s, nor more evil either. 

Presiding over them all is a billionaire, a woman born in Kolkata who has achieved wealth beyond imagination and has built a palatial home, a hexagon floating on the city's river. Her only daughter will soon be married and the rumors claim she will provide a fabulous feast for the impoverished and starving of the city. 

As Ma, Boomba, and the billionaire careen toward a tragic union, Ma's father yearns to remain in the city he knows and loves, a place that in spite of its privations, makes him laugh and feel alive. Although Ma regards her husband as a man in which "all is true," he is keeping truths from her. America is "a fading paradise," where crops wither,  rivers dwindle, and the streets are filled with silence. "Climate immigrants" face bigotry and hatred, and he knows his family won't be exempt from that poison. He withholds these facts from Ma and she tells him nothing about the stolen passports.

Boomba knows what truth has become. "The worth of honesty was itself a lie," he decides. In this novel, all absolutes become a matter of necessity. Who is evil when they commit crimes to save the people they love? And what use is virtue in any form when it can be negated by the power of the most powerful government on earth?

Who is the Guardian? Who is the Thief? At the end of this novel, the blame rests upon all of us. Megha Majumdar extends a prophesy for the future that is already much too real.