‘Moving … a humane, powerful and insightful book … a book of nonfiction so stellar it puts most novels to shame.’
The Boston Globe
‘This bravura work of nonfiction reads more like a novel for the gratifying completeness of its characters and the journey they travel over the course of several months in 2008, centering on the shocking death of a female resident of the slum and a young man who is falsely accused of her murder … Boo brings us inside their world ... Boo’s writing skills are such that she can render even a dirty slum lovely, and on a deeper level, extract sublime irony from a seemingly straightforward news story.’
David Takami, The Seattle Times
‘A small masterpiece of documentary storytelling.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Boo’s meticulous work is a must for India watchers, of course, but it is also a great example of the power of what used to be known as immersion journalism. And a cracking read.’
The Age
‘This is Boo's first book. It proclaims an astonishing ambition and a prodigious talent to match. Backed up by meticulous reporting, she delivers a nonfiction novel that combines all the emotional power of a story well told with the added intoxication that readers know all this really happened.’
Jose Borghino, The Australian
‘Boo’s reporting is a form of kinship … There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them. If we receive the fiery spirit from which it was written, it ought to change much more than that.’
Adrian LeBlanc, author of Random Family
‘This is a superb book.’
Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
‘This book blew me away … One of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I've ever read.’
Barabara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
‘A stunning achievement — a monumental work of humane and painstaking observation.’
Anna Funder, author of All That I Am
‘It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as a novel. In the hierarchy of long-form reporting, Katherine Boo is right up there.’
David Sedaris
‘This book is both a tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece.’
Judges’ Citation for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
‘A Mumbai slum imagined and understood as never before in language of intense beauty.’
Salman Rushdie
‘The best book yet written on contemporary India, and the best work of narrative nonfiction I've read in 25 years.’
Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi
‘A beautiful account, told through real-life stories, of the sorrows and joys, the anxieties and stamina, in the lives of the precarious and powerless in urban India whom a booming country has failed to absorb and integrate. A brilliant book that simultaneously informs, agitates, angers, inspires, and instigates.’
Amartya Sen, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
‘To accomplish this writing, Boo has performed a feat of access and candid reportage that amounts to a devotion … Boo has dissected, as if with scalpel and forceps, the stabilising anatomy of corruption … Boo has sculpted her reporting and language and ingenious structuring of the revelation of events … to bring us onto the streets and into the tense minds of her characters, though their lives are far from most Western readers’ experience, in their difficult corner of urban brutality.’
Mark Kramer, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
‘Ms Boo explores poverty, corruption and the hope of upward mobility that globalisation brings … a staggering work of reporting and storytelling … But it is when she explores the theme of hope that Ms Boo answers her question about how such economic disparities are sustainable. Ambition in the slums is undercut by rivalry; aspirations are met with local resentment.’
The Economist
‘That Beautiful is an unforgettable true story, meticulously researched with unblinking honesty, will make Boo’s next awards well deserved … Throughout such careful documentation, the one element missing – very much to her credit — is Boo herself. Beautiful is by no means a personal memoir; it is not a socioeconomic study on poverty or a political treatise on widespread corruption … pure, astonishing reportage with as unbiased a lens as possible trained on specific individuals in a clearly delineated section of ever-changing Mumbai … Boo’s presence as the silent reporter remains so discreet that she virtually disappears as you journey deeper and deeper, unable to turn away.’
Terry Hong, The Christian Science Monitor
‘A beautifully written, at times funny tale that is even more moving because it's true.’
Herald Sun
‘The book is a compelling read. It could be a novel; the pace is fast and moments of humour are sweet in the midst of tragedy and mishap. The characters are wonderfully conceived.’
Canberra Times
‘She wanted to observe poverty in the midst of breakneck globalisation, but it was her indelible portrait of the residents of Annawadi, not her policy musings, that kept me reading … Like most of Boo’s work, Behind the Beautiful Forevers reads like fiction, and sometimes you’ll wish it were … A slumdog’s urge to foster priceless beauty in an everything-has-a-price world is an unexpected revelation. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is littered with such moments, and Boo lets her readers witness the blossoms poking through the dung.’
Andrea Simakis, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
‘If you read no other book this year, please read this one.’
Courier Mail
‘A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction … With a cinematic intensity … Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbour about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you’ll not soon forget.’
Elle
'A riveting, fearlessly reported portrait of a poverty so obliterating that it amounts to a slow-motion genocide. Right now the book is sitting on my shelf making all the other books feel stupid.'
Entertainment Weekly
‘Boo has combined heartbreak, humour and drama to create a brilliant and thought-provoking read.’
Madison
‘A shocking — and riveting — portrait of life in modern India … This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction.’
O Magazine
‘A mindblowing read.’
Redbook
‘If you are Katherine Boo, the author of the exceptional Behind the Beautiful Forevers, you also have the compassion and steel to spend three years writing about residents of a Mumbai slum, and to do so without appearing to blink … The interconnectedness of inhabitants to one another is at once inescapable and fragile, the things that keep people together as easily as killing them … Boo, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a staff writer for The New Yorker, is surpassingly good at slipping inside the skins of those she chronicles. She does this by way of an exquisite ear … Boo puts herself on the podium with the best writers of the genre, Krakauer and Orlean, Langewiesche and Larson.’
Nancy Rommelmann, The Portland Oregonian
‘In her prose as well as her purpose, Katherine Boo calls Dickens and Zola to mind … Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an interview-based narrative in which the interviewer never appears, a murder mystery, an intricately-plotted reflection of everyday life, and a reminder that sometimes the writer’s most valuable organ is the ear.’
Judges’ citation for the National Book Award
‘Reported like Watergate, written like Great Expectations, and handily the best international nonfiction in years.’
New York
‘Incandescent writing and excruciatingly good storytelling.’
The Philadelphia Inquirer
‘Rends the heart, thrills the mind, pricks the conscience, and burns the pages.’
Washingtonian
‘Seamless and intimate … a scrupulously true story … It’s tempting to compare [Behind the Beautiful Forevers] to a novel, but … that would hardly do it justice.’
Salon
‘Extraordinary … moving … Like the best journeys, Boo’s book cracks open our preconceptions and constructs an abiding bridge — at once daunting and inspiring — to a world we would never otherwise recognise as our own.’
National Geographic Traveler
