A Fine Balance
Series: Oprah's Book Club (44)
Publisher: Vintage International
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 603
ISBN-13: 9781400030651
Copyright date: 1995
Subjects: Fiction; Fiction - General; Literary; Fiction / Literary; Reading Group Guide
First sentence: THE MORNING EXPRESS bloated with passengers slowed to a crawl, then lurched forward suddenly, as though to resume full speed.
Description: With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures 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 caste violence of their native village - will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. 

As the characters 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.

~from the back cover