"Riveting...This is a novel of our pandemic times, an exploration of precarity in all its forms...Majumdar excels at depicting the workings of power on the powerless... Fate has rarely been so many-faced, so muscular, so mercurial, or so mesmerizing as it is in A Burning." - The New York Times Book Review
"Powerful... propulsive...This is a book to relish for its details, for the caress of the writer's gaze against the world... The interplay of choice and circumstance has always been the playing field of great fiction, and on this terrain, a powerful new writer stakes her claim." - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"The must-read novel of the summer... This all-consuming story rages along, bright and scalding... Majumdar demonstrates an uncanny ability to capture the vast scope of a tumultuous society by attending to the hopes and fears of people living on the margins. The effect is transporting, often thrilling, finally harrowing... Majumdar's outrage is matched only by her sympathy for these ordinary people... [A Burning] is a damning critique of a culture that generates constant upheaval but no systemic change." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Immersive...masterly... the elements of a thriller are transmuted into prismatic portraiture... A Burning has a similar urgency of appeal [to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.] Its characters are at the very front of the stage, and we can feel their breath... Her spare plot moves with arrowlike determination...I can't remember when I last read a novel that so quickly dismantled the ordinary skepticism that attends the reading of made-up stories. Early Naipaul comes to mind as a precursor, and perhaps Akhil Sharma's stupendously vivid novel Family Life... It's only at the end of this brief, brave novel that one becomes fully aware of how broad its judgments have been, how fierce and absolute its condemnations. Through the gaps that open up among and behind these three characters, a large Indian panoply emerges." - James Wood, The New Yorker
"Powerful...a gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary... It's hard not to feel intense heartache while reading A Burning. Majumdar's powerful debut is carefully crafted for maximum impact, carving out the most urgent parts of its characters for the whole world to see. This novel rightfully commands attention." -USA Today
"In her captivating debut novel A Burning, Megha Majumdar presents a powerful corrective to the political narratives that have dominated in contemporary India." -Time
"Propulsive...ambitious...beautiful and supple...heartbreaking." - The Boston Glob
