A Fine Balance

At a time of political turmoil, the lives of four strangers collide. Rohinton Mistry’s epic masterpiece is set in India in the 1970s.

"Astonishing... A rich and varied spectacle, full of wisdom and laughter and the touches of the unexpectedly familiar through which literature illuminates life."  -  The Wall Street Journal

"You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair."  In an unnamed city by the sea in mid-1970s India, a State of Internal Emergency has been declared. In the tiny flat of the widowed Dina Dalal, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, tailors who have been forced from their village into the city, and Maneck Kohlah, a young student from a hill station near the Himalayas, are painfully constructing new lives, which become entwined in circumstances no one could have foreseen.

"Those who continue to harp on the decline of the novel... ought to consider Rohinton Mistry. He needs no infusion of magic realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is magical."  -  The New York Times

Rohinton Mistry is the author of three novels, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and a collection of short stories. His first novel, Such a Long Journey was made into an acclaimed feature film in 1998. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009, he was shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2011, and winner of the 2012 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.