This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Megha Majumdar, whose second novel, A Guardian and a Thief, is out today from Knopf. The book’s events take place in the near-future, over the course of a single week in drought-stricken Kolkata. Ma, one of the lucky ones, has a ticket out: In seven days, she will fly with her daughter and elderly father to join her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But Ma’s plans are ruined when a thief steals her purse—and the family’s passports. The story that follows is divided between Ma’s desperate bid to retrieve the immigration documents and the no less determined efforts of the thief, Boomba, to lift his own family out of a poverty entrenched by rising dangers of climate change. Kirkus Reviews, which named A Guardian and a Thief on the shortlist for its 2025 fiction prize, called the novel an “electrifying depiction of dignity and morality under siege.” Stacy Schiff agreed: “Wondering if there’s a novel out there that gives Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a run for its money? Here you go.” Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal. Majumdar is the former editor in chief of Catapult Books. She lives in New York.
Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief. (Credit: Elena Siebert)
1. How long did it take you to write A Guardian and a Thief?
Six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Facing my own failures on the page. I tried for a long time to make a different plot and different characters work, and it was disheartening when they didn’t. Each moment of landing upon a new idea felt like a solution, until, after lots of work, I realized that that idea was yet another failure.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A few months ago, I would have said: I write every day, when my son is at preschool. I write either at home or at the library. (I’m a huge fan of the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library, and I have my favorite branches and desks within those branches!) Now I have a newborn as well, so our routines are being rearranged.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Dayswork (Norton, 2023), a novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel.
5. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The fear that my vision for the next book exceeds my skill.
6. What is the earliest memory that you associate with A Guardian and a Thief?
Scooby Doo is mentioned in the book. As a child, I loved watching Scooby Doo, with the villains unmasked and revealed at the end of each episode. I wonder now about that idea of masking/unmasking our true selves. In which circumstances are we our true selves? In which circumstances do we pretend to be selves that we are not? That thought made its way into the book, and perhaps the seed for it was planted decades ago, as I watched Cartoon Network.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of the book?
That plot elements and characters who felt absolutely vital to the book in early drafts could—simply—vanish! And the book moved forward, and became truer, without them. For example, I spent ages writing the friend of a main character, who is no longer in the book.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started A Guardian and a Thief, what would you say?
Writing this book will take longer than you think, but at the end of the process you’ll have made something you’re proud of.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of A Guardian and a Thief?
Becoming a mother, and feeling the ferocity of love that parents hold for their children, and doing the daily work of parenting, helped me find the emotional core of the book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Finish the draft.
