Let's read "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" & share our thoughts over dinner

"There are books that stay with you, touch your conscience, change the way you feel and see." This is one of them. It is a piece of narrative nonfiction that reads like fiction - part Kafkaesque with the theatre of the absurd and part Dickens with garbage pickers and petty thieves. The book describes a present day slum of Mumbai, India near the new international airport and in the shadows of luxury hotels. The author mixes lyrical prose with razor like Watergate reporting to describe the interconnected lives of several residents and their families, including a young trash picker accused of an unjust crime, an ambitious female slumlord who has identified a "shadier" route to the middle class and her daughter who is destined to become the slum's first female college student. The author is an American Pulitzer Prize winner who while living in India with her Indian husband shows how some people in most desperate circumstances can find resilience to hang onto their humanity.