Books

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Four strangers—tailors, a widow, a student—collide in 1970s India. What starts as survival becomes kinship, then something even more fragile.

You should read it.

Mistry, a Booker finalist and Governor General’s Award winner, doesn’t just tell a story—he inhabits it. The prose is restrained, the structure exacting, but it’s the emotional layering that gutted me.

I had to set it down for two months after one chapter—too raw, too real. Fiction that close to lived truth feels rare.

You don’t just follow the characters. You become them.

It’s not a light read. But it may be the one you remember longest.