This book should come with a warning stating: "It may be hazardous to your rosy view that global capitalism will set the world's billions free from poverty."
The author, Katherine Boo, spent several years documenting daily life in a Mumbai slum in order to get beyond the stereotypes of modernising India depicted in many contemporary books and movies.
"For all the lush and brilliant depictions of wild festivals, megalomaniacal gangsters and soulful prostitutes, I felt stinted of some everyday truths," said Boo, who won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for public service at the Washington Post for reporting on neglect and abuse in group homes for the mentally disabled.
Now a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she specialises in stories about poverty, Boo is a gifted observer and writer, as well as a dogged reporter.
She combed through more than 3000 public records to supplement the more than three years of taped interviews that went into Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, her first book.