A Fine Balance

Synopsis

In mid-1970s India, a "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared. In the tiny flat of the widowed Dina Dalal, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, tailors who have been forced from their village into the city, and Maneck Kohlah, a young student from a hill-station near the Himalayas, are painfully constructing new lives which become entwined in circumstances no one could have foreseen.

Author Biography

Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Bombay, India.  He earned a BA  in Mathematics and Economics at the University of Bombay.  He emigrated to Canada with his wife in 1975, settling in Toronto where he studied at the University of Toronto and received a BA in English and Philosophy.

He is the author of three novels, each of which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Such a Long Journey (1991) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Governer General’s Award; A Fine Balance (1996) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Giller Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was nominated for Oprah’s Book Club Best Novel in 2001; Family Matters (2002) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2002, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and won the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Fiction and the Timothy Findley Award (Writers’ Trust of Canada). 

Rohinton Mistry lives in Ontario, Canada.