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A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance

Written by Rohinton Mistry

Shortlisted
The Booker Prize 1996
Published by Faber & Faber

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

‘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.

Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry is the author of three novels, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and a collection of short stories
More about Rohinton Mistry

Other nominated books by Rohinton Mistry

Family Matters
In Rohinton Mistry’s drama about a Parsi family in Bombay, a painful past and a present deception combine to unravel the ties of affection
Such a Long Journey
Rohinton Mistry’s first novel is set in Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh