Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-Canadian novelist whose A Fine Balance is a powerful and harrowing account of four lives colliding under the shadow of India's Emergency in the 1970s.

Rohinton Mistry is one of the great living novelists in the English language, though his output has been modest and his readership smaller than his stature deserves. A Fine Balance, published in 1995, is his masterwork: set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of the mid-1970s, it follows four characters — two tailors, a young woman, and her student lodger — whose lives intertwine under conditions of extraordinary brutality and political repression. The novel is long, demanding, and heartbreaking in ways that accumulate slowly and then strike hard.

Mistry writes with the moral seriousness and formal control of the nineteenth-century novelists he clearly admires — Dickens and Tolstoy come to mind — but his voice is entirely his own. The novel’s portrait of caste violence, forced sterilization, and bureaucratic cruelty is unflinching, and its emotional power comes precisely from how carefully Mistry has built his characters before allowing them to be destroyed or diminished. It is one of those books that changes what you think the novel is capable of.

A Fine Balance is not recommended for readers seeking comfort. Mistry makes no concessions to easy resolution, and the reading experience can be grinding. But readers willing to meet it on its own terms will find it one of the most important and moving novels written in the last fifty years.