A Fine Balance

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recalls the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India.   A Fine Balance , by Rohinton Mistry, is set in 1975 during the State of Emergency imposed on India by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.   The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared the State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state. "