Search - A Fine Balance

I loved this story of hope, struggles, friendships, more struggles, and the resolve that love between friends is, after all, what is most important. I felt so many emotions as I became fully involved with the two tailors' lives and then with their friends and their encounters. I sensed their incredible joy when receiving some unexpected good and felt their disappointment when they so often were wronged. But those contrasts were incredible! That made the book. It's thick...but read it...you'll want it to be even longer.

From Library Journal:

In mid-1970s urban India-a chaos of wretchedness on the streets and slogans in the offices-a chain of circumstances tosses four varied individuals together in one small flat. Stubbornly independent Dina, widowed early, takes in Maneck, the college-aged son of a more prosperous childhood friend and, more reluctantly, Ishvar and Om, uncle and nephew tailors fleeing low-caste origins and astonishing hardships. The reader first learns the characters' separate, compelling histories of brief joys and abiding sorrows, then watches as barriers of class, suspicion, and politeness are gradually dissolved. Even more affecting than Mistry's depictions of squalor and grotesque injustice is his study of friendships emerging unexpectedly, naturally. The novel's coda is cruel and heart-wrenching but deeply honest.

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.

One of the best books I have ever read. ONe of the best discussions my book club has ever had.