Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

From 2007-2011, Katherine Boo documented the lives of people living in Annawadi, a slum under persistent threat of demolition near luxury hotels in the vicinity of the Mumbai airport. Her compelling narrative reads like fiction but it is harrowingly true. Boo, an American married to an Indian and alternately residing in both countries, presses “uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.” She reveals basic truths that govern slum dwellers’ lives: “that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all.” (Random House)