Chaos

In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver meals to the rich under cover of darkness. Others in the pestilent, depleted city do what they must to feed their loved ones – storming ration shops, looting the pantries of the well-to-do, even battering old women for a fistful of green beans. A Guardian and a Thief follows Majumdar’s virtuosic debut, the political fiction A Burning. It opens a week before the flight that is meant to take a woman, known only as Ma (Bengali for ‘Mother’), along with her young daughter and widower father, from Kolkata to Michigan, where Ma’s husband, a research scientist, awaits them. In the meantime, the child needs to eat.

Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’. Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the human collateral damage consisted of furious women, abandoned offspring and wounded spirits’.