India, March 13 -- Who inherits the last morsels of grain and scarce onions, when farmers have dropped in the fields from the heat, and the crops have wilted beyond rescue anyway?

What survives when mercy is gone, and morals; when survival requires savagery, and even that barely gets the job done?

Megha Majumdar's second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, has been longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction. It is set in a future Kolkata where a woman is fighting to feed her two-year-old daughter and elderly father. She has been keeping them fairly healthy by stealing supplies from the charity she heads. Now, their climate visas have arrived and they can finally join her husband in the US, which remains a land of milk and honey, if a ...