A Fine Balance

The eagerly awaited novel from the author of the award-winning Such a Long Journey is set in India in the mid-1970s. A "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared, and in the days of bleakness and hope that follow, four disparate people find their lives becoming unexpectedly and inextricably entwined.
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificant novel caputures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the cast violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.As the cahracters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love. "A Fine Balance" creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.